Regional Variation and Syntactic Derivation of Low-frequency need -passives on Twitter

Abstract

This paper examines constructions formed by the verb need taking a passivized complement. While previous dialectological, sociolinguistic, and micro-syntactic analyses have focused primarily on the past-participle complement (need+ED) as a regional syntactic variable, this study expands the purview of need-passives to examine gerund-participle (need+ING) and infinitival (need+TO) complements. It also looks beyond purported need+ED regions to examine need-passive variation in Englishes spoken around the world. Data from Twitter confirm previous findings that need+ED is a productive feature of the US Midland, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Tyneside, England. However, tweets also show that need+ING is produced disproportionately frequently in England and Wales. These results reveal a more complex pattern of need-passive variation in global Englishes than has previously been reported. Additionally, a transitive construction formed with need as a matrix verb is examined and found to co-vary regionally with need+ING. Syntactic analyses of tweets reveal similarities in the ways that need+ED and need+ING vary with need+TO. These findings lead to a proposed syntactic analysis that need+ED and need+ING share the same derivational structure. More generally, the work argues for greater attention in linguistic research to low-frequency features.