•
All to mean
all gone: When referring to consumable products, the word
all has a secondary meaning:
all gone. For example, the phrase ''the butter's all'' would be understood as "the butter is all gone." This likely derives from German. • "
Positive anymore": In addition to the normal negative use of
anymore it can also, as in the greater
Midland U.S. dialect, be used in a positive sense to mean "these days" or "nowadays". An example is "I wear these shoes a lot anymore". While in Standard English
anymore must be used as a negative polarity item (NPI), some speakers in Pittsburgh and throughout the Midland area do not have this restriction. This is somewhat common in both the Midland regions (Montgomery 1989) and in northern Maryland (Frederick, Hagerstown, and Westminster), likely of Scots-Irish origin. • Reversed usage of
leave and
let: Examples of this include "Leave him go outside" and "Let the book on the table".
Leave is used in some contexts in which, in standard English,
let would be used; and vice versa. Used in Southwestern Pennsylvania and elsewhere, this is either Pennsylvania Dutch or Scots-Irish. Examples of this include "The car needs washed", "The cat wants petted", and "Babies like cuddled". More common constructions are "The grass needs cutting" or "The grass needs to be cut" or "Babies like cuddling" or "Babies like to be cuddled"; "The car needs washing" or "The car needs to be washed"; and "The cat wants petting" or "The cat wants to be petted." Found predominantly in the North Midland region, this is especially common in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Need + past participle is the most common construction, followed by
want + past participle, and then
like + past participle. The forms are "implicationally related" to one another (Murray and Simon 2002). This means the existence of a less common construction from the list in a given location entails the existence of the more common ones there, but not vice versa. The constructions "
like + past participle" and "
need + past participle" are Scots-Irish. While Adams argues that "
want + past participle" could be from Scots-Irish or German, it seems likely that this construction is Scots-Irish, as Murray and Simon claim.
like and
need + past participle are Scots-Irish, the distributions of all three constructions are implicationally related, the area where they are predominantly found is most heavily influenced by Scots-Irish, and a related construction, "
want + directional adverb", as in "The cat wants out", is Scots-Irish. • "Punctual
whenever": "Whenever" is often used to mean "at the time that." An example is "My mother, whenever she passed away, she had pneumonia." A
punctual descriptor refers to the use of the word for "a onetime momentary event rather than in its two common uses for a recurrent event or a conditional one". This Scots-Irish usage is found in the Midlands and the South. ==Notable lifelong speakers==