A DISTRIBUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF RURAL COLORADO ENGLISH by LAMONT D. ANTIEAU (Under the Direction of William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.) ABSTRACT This dissertation describes a study in linguistic geography conducted in Colorado using the methodology of the Linguistic Atlas of the Western States. As such, the goals of this dissertation are threefold: 1) to provide a description of Colorado English with respect to select lexical, phonetic, and syntactic features; 2) to compare the results of work in Colorado with previous work conducted in the eastern states as well as in Colorado and other western states; and 3) to use inferential statistics to show correlation between the distribution of specific linguistic variants and the social characteristics of those informants who use these variants. The major findings of this study include the observation that linguistic variants are distributed according to a power law, that numerous variants have statistically significant social correlates at all levels of the grammar, and that the relative effect of social variables differ at each linguistic level. INDEX WORDS: Linguistic Geography, Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Language Variation, American English, Western American English, Colorado English, Rural Speech, Kruskal-Wallis A DISTRIBUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF RURAL COLORADO ENGLISH by LAMONT D. ANTIEAU BA, Eastern Michigan University, 1996 MA, Eastern Michigan University, 1998 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2006 © 2006 Lamont D. Antieau All Rights Reserved A DISTRIBUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF RURAL COLORADO ENGLISH by LAMONT D. ANTIEAU Major Professor: William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. Committee: Marlyse Baptista Lee Pederson Diane Ranson Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2006 DEDICATION This work is dedicated to the good people of Colorado who welcomed me into their homes and into their lives. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work could not have been done without the help of a great many people. First of all, I would like to thank my committee members, who provided me with the tools and the guidance to complete this work. I would like to thank Dr. William Kretzschmar, who has been such a great influence on me as a scholar and thinker and who personally guided me through several of the facets required to complete this project. Dr. Lee Pederson introduced me to the LAWS project and encouraged me to do the best work possible within the constraints of Atlas methodology; I hope that I have done as much in these pages and I want to thank him for being such a great part of the work I conducted in Colorado. I would also like to thank Dr. Diane Ranson for her professionalism, her keen eye for detail, as well as her vision of the bigger picture, and her good advice and kind words when I needed them. And I would like to thank Dr. Marlyse Baptista for her enthusiasm for the subject of linguistics, which she has handed down to so many of her students in so many ways. In addition to my committee members, I need to acknowledge two scholars who have mentored me and whose work certainly influenced this dissertation in numerous ways. First, I would like to thank Dr. Ellen Johnson, who influenced me through her book on southeastern American English and in her teaching of a class in field methods the first semester that I attended the University of Georgia. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the late Dr. Keith Denning, formerly of Eastern Michigan University, who introduced me to the subject of language variation and required me to do my first sociolinguistic fieldwork. Like many of his former students and colleagues, I miss Keith dearly, both personally and professionally. v Of course, I could not have finished this project had it not been for my family, which has given me so much support in so many ways over the years that it is hard to even know where to begin. Having said that, I know that I need to start with Mom, who has always been supportive even if she didn’t know exactly what in the world I was up to; you are a wonderful mother and a special person. To Don, who has given everyone in my family so much of his time and energy that it’s sometimes difficult to know how we got along without you. To Alicia, Isaac, James, and Jacob, for providing me with a bed to sleep in, a pool to swim in, and an excuse for visiting the Detroit Zoo during my summertime visits up in Michigan. To Dana, James, and Katie, for being patient with me and for understanding my reluctance to travel those few hundred extra miles to their home during my vacations: I'll make it up to your part of the mitten again soon, I swear! To Heather, Dennis, Alissa, and Alexis (and even Molly), thanks for providing me with a roof over my head, food to eat, and work to do during the lean winter months of 2006; I miss your companionship. I hope this achievement gives you all something to be proud of – I couldn’t have done it without your love and support! With the greatest appreciation, I would like to thank my friends in Colorado, particularly Marty, Linda, and Hannah, who housed and fed me during the field work phase of this project when I was at my most road-weary and let me know I could count on them for support and friendship. Also, thanks goes to Dale Blake, whose unabashed enthusiasm for his own academic discipline – mathematics – and the teaching of it helped me get over some of those “what’s the use?” and “what is it good for?” moments that creep in during the waking hours of many a dissertating student. I also gratefully acknowledge the Humphreys-Parle family, which treated me like one of the clan on our trip from Boulder, Colorado, through Nebraska, more Nebraska, and even more Nebraska, on our way back to our Michigan stomping grounds in time for the vi 2001 holiday season; that trip, with its copious restaurant stops and good humor, helped me to keep some perspective on this project. I consider myself fortunate in having the classmates I did while at the University of Georgia, as I learned so much from them during the classes we had together from 1998-2000, including Betsy Barry, Karen Burdette, Allison Burkette, Lisa Cohen, Clayton Darwin, Anne Marie Hamilton, Joe Kuhl, and Susan Tamasi. Later on, I had the great opportunity of getting to know incoming students to the program, including Brooke Erhardt, Becky Childs, Keith Kennetz, Iyabo Osiapem, and Keith Winkler, and got some fresh perspectives on matters linguistic from them. I’d also like to thank those who helped me on the administrative end of things, including Debbie Vaughn, Lynnette Lang, Chris Hayes, Jared Klein, Don McCreary and the late William Provost. And finally, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the interaction that I had with the UGA students who attended the classes that I taught as a graduate student at the university. I’ll miss having the opportunity to see these people as often as I have over the years. In addition, I need to thank everyone who assisted in transcribing the interviews that form the foundation of this work: Betsy Barry, Ed Cowan, Clayton Darwin, Brooke Heller, Carla Johnson, Zeina Maalouf, Kathryn Morgan, Lee Pederson, and Tim Riley. I would also like to thank Meredith Barna, whose interview in Crested Butte, Colorado, in the summer of 2001, alerted me to some of the challenges I would face in conducting fieldwork in Colorado. Also, I have a great appreciation for the efforts of two earlier Colorado fieldworkers – David Newton and Josephine Preston – whose work informed my own interviewing style, and whose interviews serve as a significant contribution to the Colorado corpus in particular and the Linguistic Atlas of the Western States in general. vii I would also like to acknowledge the support of two universities in addition to UGA that I had the good fortune to work at while working on my dissertation: Mississippi State University and Western Carolina University. At MSU, several scholars inquired into my work and supported me in any way they could, particularly Matt Little, Rich Raymond, Rich Lyons, Steve Chrestman, Gordon Garretson, and Benjamin and Shalay Torbert; I also wouldn’t have been able to function as I did at the university without the generous assistance of Joyce Harris and Carlene Hatchett. In conjunction with the MSU folks, I would like to thank Rachel Shuttlesworth of the University of Alabama for her role in me getting the opportunity to teach at Mississippi State. At Western Carolina University, I was fortunate in working with several people who supported me while I was dissertating and teaching classes at WCU, including Elizabeth Addison, Chandrika Rogers, Newt Smith, Roxane Stiles and Pamela Pittman. I not only enjoyed working with these folks and others at the universities, but had some wonderful experiences getting to know the students at each school as well. Several people at libraries throughout Colorado and Georgia were of great assistance to me in doing some of the library research that I needed to do for this project. Among these folks were David Hays and his staff in the archives of the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The folks in the Western History Department of the Denver Public Library were also very helpful during the research I conducted on the history of Colorado for the dissertation.