Sunday, November 25, 2007

Double modals

A number of people who attended my TESL Ontario presentations on Thursday and Saturday seemed skeptical that modal auxiliary verbs co-occur in southern dialects. Ben Zimmer comes to the rescue with a perfect example, and from a US presidential candidate nonetheless. As far as I know, however, there are no dialects that allow multiple coordinator constructions like "and but" (which was the point I was making in my presentation).

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