TO WHERE ... as subordinator: a camouflaged syntactic Southernism

Bradley Harris

Sat. 2:00-3:40 D

An inventory of about one hundred tokens of to where..., collected incidentally during ethnographic research from speakers of Southern American English, suggests that the phrase occurs in two distinct types of uses as a Southern regionalism hitherto undescribed in the linguistic literature:

(1) As subordinator introducing a noun clause for example:

we were drinking beer that night to where we couldn't walk straight.

(2) As subordinator introducing an adverbial subordinate clause, as in:

I welded a gusset between the legs of the table to where it wouldn't wobble.

Uses of type (1) place to where roughly in the role of to the extent that or to the point where, while type (2) uses fulfill role of expressions like such that or so that. Every one of the tokens collected falls into one or other of the two types described, with type (1) uses being twice as frequent as those of type (2) Both casual observation and American linguistic atlases establish that these use of to where are clearly Southern regionalisms.

These observations, combined with data on the speakers sampled, suggest three hypotheses worthy of further investigation. First among these is the hypothesis that the type (1) use of to where, being more common, originated earlier than the rarer type (2). The second hypothesis is that the type (2) use bears a clearer relation to rurality and to lower social class than does type (1). The third hypotheses is that both uses of to where are noticeably more common among Caucasian Southerners than among African-Americans. I suggest specific archival, ethnographic and survey-based methods for testing these hypotheses.

Finally, I discuss ways in which this study illustrates trends in the discovery of Southern regionalisms--why the number of recognized regionalisms is small, why so many recognized regionalisms are lexical and phonological and so few syntactic, and how dialectologists can usefully expand their lists of the regionalisms that serve as distinctive markers of Southern American English.