The social meaning of syntactic variation
I work at the interface of syntax and sociolinguistics, exploring practical issues of data collection and analysis, as well as theoretical issues about the location of variation in the grammar and modeling (morpho-)syntactic variation with the tools of generative syntax. I use corpus and experimental work to investigate morpho-syntactic variation and the social meaning associated with the use of different linguistic variants.
In my dissertation, I present experimental perception work on negative concord (I didn't see nothing) and NPI (I didn't see anything) sentences in different syntactic configurations. I find that when negative concord morphology is used instead of NPI morphology, speakers are perceived as less intelligent, lower class, less educated, and less friendly. Importantly, inverted sentences received the same ratings, regardless of morphological condition. That is, declarative sentences like Didn't nobody see him and Didn't anybody see him were perceived as less intelligent, lower class, less educated, and less friendly. Therefore, my dissertaton provides evidence of a word order variable that carries social meaning.
My full CV can be found here.
Dissertation
Robinson, Mary. 2022. Negative concord as a window into the social perception of morphological and syntactic variables.
Doctoral dissertation, New York University. (pre-pub pdf)
Outputs
Journal Articles:
(In prep.) Robinson, Mary. Syntax can be socially evaluated in perception: Evidence from Negative Concord in English.
Robinson, Mary and Karen P. Corrigan. Under review. Recognising the Diverse Voices of Young EU Migrants in Northern Ireland: Experiences of Navigating a Divided Society on the Eve of Brexit [Special Issue: Navigating Language, Identity and Belonging: Migration Experiences in Post-Brexit Europe].
Robinson, Mary, Karen P. Corrigan and James Fisher. 2025. “It’s the way I talk, y’knaa?”: Accent, dialect, assumptions and bias. The Clinical Teacher 22(3), e70084. DOI: 10.1111/tct.70084
Edited Volumes:
Duncan, Daniel and Mary Robinson (eds). Accepted. English Sociosyntax: Theory, Evidence, Approaches (Topics in English Linguistics Series). Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Book Chapters:
Duncan, Daniel and Mary Robinson. Under review. If Blink-182 went country: Genre convention and stylization in cover songs. In Valentin Werner, Cecelia Cutler and Andrew Moody (eds.), The Sociolinguistics of Pop Culture. Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Jennifer, Mary Robinson, Marc Barnard and Brian Aitken. Under review. Reliability and accountability in crowdsourced dialect data. In Patricia Cukor-Avila, Sali A. Tagliamonte and Guy Bailey (eds.), Empirical Accountability in Variationist Linguistics: Taking the Next Step (Studies in Language Variation and Change Series). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Duncan, Daniel and Mary Robinson. Accepted. Introduction. In Daniel Duncan and Mary Robinson (eds.), English Sociosyntax: Theory, Evidence, Approaches (Topics in English Linguistics Series). Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Corrigan, Karen P. and Mary Robinson. Accepted. Polish newcomers acquiring questions and questioning in a local dialect. In Daniel Duncan and Mary Robinson (eds.), English Sociosyntax: Theory, Evidence, Approaches (Topics in English Linguistics Series). Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
MacKenzie, Laurel and Mary Robinson. Accepted. Spelling out grammatical variation. In Daniel Duncan and Mary Robinson (eds.), English Sociosyntax: Theory, Evidence, Approaches (Topics in English Linguistics Series). Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Conference Proceedings:
Robinson, Mary and Gary Thoms. 2021. Long distance negative concord in English. In Alessa Farinella and Angelica Hill (eds.), NELS 51: Proceedings of the Fifty-first Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society : November 6-8, 2020, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, 181–190. University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Robinson, Mary and Gary Thoms. 2021. On the syntax of English variable negative concord. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 27(1). 195–204. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol27/iss1/24/
Robinson, Mary and Daniel Duncan. 2019. Holistic approaches to syntactic variation: Wh-all questions in English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 25(1). 209-218. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol25/iss1/23
Digital Outputs:
Corrigan, Karen P. and Mary Robinson. 2024. Speak for Yersel Northern Ireland. Newcastle University. https://speakforyersel.ac.uk/ni
Strange, Louis, Karen P. Corrigan and Mary Robinson. 2024. Speak for Yersel Republic of Ireland. University of Glasgow and Newcastle University. https://speakforyersel.ac.uk/roi
Smith, Jennifer, Brian Aitken, Bruce Eunson, and Mary Robinson. 2022. Speak for Yersel. University of Glasgow. https://speakforyersel.ac.uk
Presentations
Aitken, Brian, Jennifer Smith, Mary Robinson, Marc Barnard. 2025. Democratising dialect: Crowdsourcing language data across geographic space. Paper presentation at Digital Humanities Conference 2025 (DH2025), Lisbon, Portugal, July 14-18.
Robinson, Mary. 2025. Identity and belonging in a divided society: Experiences of young EU migrants in Northern Ireland. Invited talk at the Center for Linguistics, Language Education and Acquisition Research, University of Southampton, 22 January. (slides)
Corrigan, Karen P. and Mary Robinson. 2024. “I’m always asked am I from Ireland”: Inversion in embedded questions in local and newcomer Mid-Ulster English. Paper presentation at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 52, Miami, Florida, November 7-9. (poster)
Robinson, Mary and Karen P. Corrigan. 2024. Young EU migrants in Northern Ireland: Experiences of navigating a divided society on the eve of Brexit. Paper presentation at European Migrants in the UK in the Brexit Era: Discursive Approaches, University of Liverpool, June 12-13. (slides)
Corrigan, Karen P. and Mary Robinson. 2024. Acquiring Embedded Inverted Questions in Mid Ulster English: Local Constraints on a Global Phenomenon. Paper presentation at New Perspectives on Irish English (NPIE) 8, Cáceres, Spain, May 16-18. (slides)
Corrigan, Karen P. and Mary Robinson. 2023. “I Listen to Cool FM and Polish Radio – Everything Mixed”: To What Extent is the Irish-English of Polish Newcomers to Northern Ireland Similarly Fused? Poster presentation at UK Language Variation and Change (UKLVC) 14, University of Edinburgh, June 26-28. (poster)
Smith, Jennifer, Brian Aitken, Marc Barnard and Mary Robinson. 2023. Speak for Yersel: Crowdsourcing Scots in the 21st century. Paper presentation at UK Language Variation and Change (UKLVC) 14, University of Edinburgh, June 26-28.
Duncan, Daniel and Mary Robinson. 2023. If Blink-182 went country: Genre convention and stylization in cover songs. Paper presentation at Sociolinguistics of Pop Culture, University of Bamberg, March 30-31. (slides)
Corrigan, Karen P. and Mary Robinson. 2023. The Impact of Migration on the Survival of Mother Languages in the Past and Present. Invited talk at Heritage from Home 3 talk series, Libraries NI, February 24.
Smith, Jennifer and Mary Robinson. 2022. Speak for Yersel: crowdsourcing Scots in the 21st century. Invited talk at the Center for the Study of Language and Society, University of Bern, November 30.
Robinson, Mary. 2022. Variable Negative Concord in English and the Social Meaning of Syntactic Variation. Invited talk given at Ulster University Research Seminars in Linguistics, November 4. (slides)
Smith, Jennifer and Mary Robinson. 2022. Speak for yersel: studying Scots in the 21st century classroom. Invited talk given at University of Bamberg, June 14.
Robinson, Mary. 2021. “‘Couldn’t nobody’ sounds more familiar to me than the other way”: Perception of word order variation in English Negative Concord. Paper presentation at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 49, University of Texas at Austin, October 19-24. (slides)
Thoms, Gary and Mary Robinson. 2021. “Nobody didn’t dare… in them days”: Subject Negative Concord in British English varieties. Paper presentation at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 49, University of Texas at Austin, October 19-24. (slides)
Robinson, Mary. 2021. A cross-dialectal comparison of Negative Concord perception in English. Poster presentation at UK Language Variation and Change (UKLVC13), University of Glasgow, September 8-10. (poster)
Robinson, Mary. 2021. A holistic approach to negative concord in English. Poster presentation at Morphosyntactic variation and change in the 21st century (MVC21), Cambridge University, March 17-18. (poster)
Robinson, Mary. 2021. Negative concord as a window into the social perception of morphological and syntactic variables. Invited talk at Linguistic Seminar Series, Newcastle University, March 10. (slides)
Robinson, Mary and Gary Thoms. 2020. On the syntax of variable negative concord in English varieties. Paper presentation at 51st Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 51), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), November 6-8, 2020. (handout)
Robinson, Mary. 2020. Multiple loci of variation: A case study of negative concord in English varieties. Paper presentation at Cambridge Comparative Syntax 9 (CamCoS 9 New), Newcastle University, September 8-11. (slides)
Robinson, Mary and Gary Thoms 2020. On the syntax of English variable negative concord. Paper presentation at 44th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC 44), University of Pennsylvania, March 27-29. (Conference canceled)
Robinson, Mary. 2019. Perception of syntactic variation: What is "too abstract" for social evaluation? Poster presentation at Multimethodological Approaches to Synchronic and Diachronic Variation Workshop, University of Potsdam, October 25-26. (poster)
Robinson, Mary. 2019. Is there social evaluation of syntactic variation? Two perception studies of word order variation in American English. Paper presentation at 4th Conference on Experimental Approaches to Perception and Production of Language Variation (ExAPP), University of Münster, September 26-28. (slides)
Robinson, Mary. 2019. Does syntactic variation carry social meaning?: Two perception studies of word order variation in American English. Poster presentation at Social Meaning Workshop, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, March 20-21. (poster)
Robinson, Mary and Laurel Mackenzie. 2019. Socially-evaluated syntactic variation? A perception study of the English particle verb alternation. Poster presentation at Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting 2019, New York City. (poster)
Robinson, Mary. 2018. Who all cares if you say who all?: Social perception of syntactic variation. Paper presentation at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 47, New York University. October 19-21. (slides)
Robinson, Mary and Daniel Duncan. 2018. Holistic approaches to syntactic variation: Wh-all questions in English. Paper presentation at 42nd Annual Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC 42), University of Pennsylvania. March 23-28. (slides)
Robinson, Mary. 2017. Preposition stranding in Brazilian Portuguese. Paper presentation at Stony Brook-Yale-NYU-CUNY (SYNC) Graduate Linguistics Conference 2017, Yale University. December 9. (handout)
Gilbert, Maddie, Gregory Guy, and Mary Robinson. 2017. ‘A gente sempre faz’: Subject pronoun expression in Brazilian Portuguese. Paper presentation at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 46, University of Wisconsin-Madison. November 2-5.
Robinson, Mary and Laurel MacKenzie. 2017. Where does the social meet the linguistic? Poster presentation at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 46, University of Wisconsin-Madison. November 2-5. (poster)
Robinson, Mary and Daniel Duncan. 2017. Who all can say who all in American English? Paper presentation at Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE) 7, University of Vigo. September 28-30. (slides)
Robinson, Mary. 2016. Phrase-final so: an Inquisitive Semantics approach. Paper presentation at Stony Brook-Yale-NYU-CUNY (SYNC) Graduate Linguistics Conference 2016, City University of New York. December 3. (handout)