Ozark Southern English

Ozark is a dialect of American English that is phonologically distinct from other Southern dialects. Due to the isolation of the mountainous region and the late settlement of the area, the Ozark mountains feature a variant of hillspar that is unlike the more general Piedmont Southern spoken in Arkansas and Missouri.

In recent years, the music and entertainment scene in Branson, Missouri has made some Ozark dialect expressions more familiar to Americans outside the region; examples include "get 'er done" and "branch water".

Ozark English (grammar description)

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people”

The subject in English, both transitive and intransitive, is known to have a wide range of semantic and pragmatic meanings associated with it. There seems, however, to be a dialectal variation in Ozark English (OZ) in this respect. According to the data of the research published by J.F. Foster in 1979 , in OZ, the surface slot of transitive active subject is coming to be associated with the semantic notion of wilful and / or responsible agency, and that nouns denoting things believed in that culture to be incapable of that kind of agency are not appropriate subjects of such transitive active verbs. The sentences indicated in (1) and (2) are evidently good in Standard American English (hereinafter SE) and most its dialects, sentence (3) is however a little strange in OZ.(1) The old mill runs by / off (of) / on / with / from water. (2) They still run the old mill off water.(3) ? Water still runs the old mill. Both (1) and (2) are fine sentences in OZ, but it seems a little odd to have water, the ostensible source of power, in subject position. Even in such common English sentences as those in (4), the sentences more apt to appear in OZ are those in which the key is not the subject of the action. (4) a. Now you use this key to open the storm cellar door with.b. I can open the storm cellar door with this key.c. ? This key opens the storm cellar door. If one asks an Ozarker whether (4c) is a good sentence, i.e. whether somebody “from around here might say that”, the answer is going to be an affirmative one. However, the informant will offer a paraphrase of the (a), or (b) type in which the instrument is not the subject. That is, the Ozarker seems to want the patient to be the subject in sentences of this sort, or, failing that, at least not to have the instrument / agent be the subject . In other words, OZ appears to be extending the formal differences between instruments and true agents by restricting the general English pattern whereby the instrument can become the subject. Since these structures where the instrument with either instrumental or locative preposition tacked onto an intransitive patient-verb pair are already available in English, OZ can readily extend their use and such surface structures could easily become regarded as the appropriate vehicle for conveying “transitive notions” without imputing responsible causality to the instrument.

Explaining the strangeness of the sentence “A falling stone killed him”, Foster uses the terms from the active language lexicon. “When I first saw this I thought that sentence seemed strange. Stone is not a part of the active OZ lexicon and I tried to substituting rock or boulder; still it was odd… The above sentence implies that stones can kill people. If the rural Ozarker wished to indicate that no particular act of deliberation or neglect was responsible for the death due to the deceased being in the wrong place when a rock fell, he would be more apt to say something on the order of “He died from a rock fallin’ on him (and hittin’ him in the head)”…”.

Interestingly, there is a class of situations which even in SE seem to be more preferred to represent intransitive structures than transitive ones, specially death or illness due to disease. There is no speaker of SE who thinks (5) equally acceptable in normal circumstances with (6):(5) * Cancer killed him.(6) He died from cancer.This is all the more reason to think that OZ is engaging in a familiar process of language change by extension of the scope of coverage of a pattern already available. Another example that supports Foster’s idea about the presence, although not so common, of the same structure in English is the slogan “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people”, that in this day of debate over gun control laws found wide adoption, might well have been coined by an Ozarker, but so far as Foster knows, it was not.Summing up the data about OZ, Foster suggests that at present “it has become an active language in the sense of Klimov” or at least “seems to be moving in the direction of becoming active” . According to Foster, “OZ is much more reminiscent of such active languages as Bats and Dakota” . Such a linguistic development that is taking / has taken place in OZ “has taken a direction under cultural selection which makes it adaptive to a culture in which there is considerable interest in fixing responsibility and agency for events” . Linguistically Foster explains such a typological change by saying that where a grammar offers an option, the cultural system has the potential for commandeering the optional alternation to symbolize semanticopragmatic differences .

An alternative that Foster considers for another possible one is that OZ could be moving in the direction of an ergative-accusative system . In such a case, a consideration could be a line of investigation which promises an explanation for the very widespread existence of languages with ergative morphology for case-marking of patients and agents for nouns (and third person pronouns derived from nouns, demonstratives or classifiers) on the one hand but which also have accusative morphology for these relations in the personal pronoun (especially 1st and 2nd) system. Thus the marked personal pronoun is the patient rather than the agent while for the nouns, the marked relation is the agent, not the patient. Now the first and second person pronouns generally have human referents, i.e. entities which will be among those things many cultures will believe to be capable of agency. Accusative morphology in effect announces that the object symbolized in this pronoun in this sentence is acting as a patient although it would often (normally?) be an agent. This is a possible development that Foster considers in answering the question why we eventually find mixed systems of accusative pronouns and ergatively marked nouns. According to him, they arise from generalization of an active system in which things that are very likely to be agents become specially marked when they are patients and things that are apt to be patients are marked when they are agents. Thus, such a development would also imply an active stage of a language as Foster’s first theory.