Date: Fri, 20 Oct 1995 13:05:26 -0500 From: Natalie Maynor Subject: Re: y'all are crazy > meaning "you and yours." I think that thorough research would conclude > that there is always some implied or connoted plural meaning even when it > might seem otherwise. In SOD (Survey of Oklahoma Dialects), Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery found a large number of people who claimed to use singular "y'all" themselves. This might be easy to ignore, given that Oklahoma is not *really* the South, but they claim that the 1994 Southern Focus Poll, conducted by the Center for Study of the American South at UNC, found similar self- reports among respondents in The Real South. As a native Southerner, I'm convinced that they're wrong, of course. Come to the ADS meeting in Chicago to hear why -- if I've figured out how to prove it by then -- if I haven't, you'll have to be satisfied with hearing about things like "y'all"/"you-all" distribution instead. --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)