LINGUIST List 5.336

Tue 22 Mar 1994

Disc: Metalinguistic awareness?

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1. Richard Hudson UCL, Metalinguistic awareness

Mark Louden suggests that people aren't aware of syntactic variation, in
contrast with phonological and lexical. Is that true? What about negative
concord (or whatever you call it - examples like "I didn't see nothing/
anything")? Lots of people even have a name for it. If there is an imbalance
between syntax and other levels it's easy to explain without assuming
differences of awareness: most people just don't have names for syntactic
patterns.

Dick Hudson
Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
(071) 387 7050 ext 3152