Hyper-Correction and the Use of Pronoun Conjunctions in American English

Abstract

This paper investigates how speakers of American English coordinate pronouns in sentences when one of those pronouns is a first person pronoun, focusing on hypercorrection. We found that the frequency in which those phrases are found in the language is important, but other factors were also present, such as experience with prescriptivism, language change, and deviation from prescriptive rules. For this paper, we used both the COCA corpus and an acceptability survey to better understand American English speakers’ attitudes towards different pronoun coordination types. Both corpus and survey data are necessary to get a full picture of how people use and judge language. This study helps us understand how grammar rules are changing in American English, while reflecting how meta-linguistic processes shape our use and acceptance of different utterances.