Date:  Fri, 4 Apr 1997 15:16:27 -0500
<br>From:  Beverly Flanigan  FLANIGAN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU 
<br>Subject: Re: for-to
<br>
<br>  Like Bethany, I remember the for-to infinitive analysis from Jacobs and
<br>  Rosenbaum: the Equi-NP drops out of the S', and then the 'for'
<br>  complementizer is deleted--in modern _standard_ English, but not
<br>  necessarily in "nonstandard" dialects or in creoles. I recall, more
<br>  vaguely, Bickerton's analysis of the fi/tu complementizer in Guyanese
<br>  Creole, and I'm aware that 'for' is kept and 'to' is deleted in (many?)
<br>  English creoles. An interesting sidenote: When I was in high school a
<br>  new student moved up to Minnesota from South Carolina (I believe), and
<br>  I was struck by her use of 'for,' as in "I want for go," "He likes for
<br>  play." She was a white German-surnamed farm girl, and I wondered (but
<br>  never asked) where she got that construction--maybe from Black or
<br>  Gullah-speaking friends? Or is the form used by others in the South?
<br>  Perhaps that experience was the genesis of my interest in linguistics!
<br>
<br>  Peter Patrick asked about mapping syntactic variation in dialects. A
<br>  few of us are indeed beginning to do that, believing that lexical and
<br>  phonological mappings are not enough. My students and I are working on
<br>  Ohio, and others on this list are doing other areas. I suspect we're
<br>  all willing to share!
<br>                      Beverly Flanigan
<br>