Janet M. Fuller, Alison Romsershausen and Cody Shanks

             The use of punctual ‘whenever’, as exemplified in example 1, has been shown to be a feature of Scotch-Irish English that can be found in the Southern and south Midlands areas of the United States, along with other features such as ‘needs washed’ and double modals (Montgomery and Kirk 2001). Montgomery and Kirk thoroughly explore the semantic aspects of this variant, noting that it is often misinterpreted and overlooked by speakers of other dialects who use it only for non-punctual meanings, as in example 2.

1. Whenever I turned sixteen, I started working at Sonic.
2. Whenever I see him, he’s always wearing that same shirt.

              While the meaning of punctual ‘whenever’ has been illuminated in previous research, its distribution and contemporary development remain under-researched. Its geographical distribution in the U.S. has been vaguely outlined through citations of its use from North Carolina (Crowell 1978) to Texas (Bailey and Cukor-Avila 1991), with a clear pattern of use in the Appalachians (Montgomery and Kirk 2001), but the distribution over time and with age has yet to be investigated. This study makes a modest move toward filling that gap in the research on punctual ‘whenever’ by examining its use among youths ages 15-25 in the South Midlands, in particular southern Illinois and southern Indiana.
This research will be carried out through a survey of speakers in the target age range and region using contacts of the researchers in Carbondale, IL, Marion, IL, and Evansville, IN and Newburgh, IN. Twenty speakers will be surveyed in each location. The questionnaire asks for acceptability judgments on five sentences, two including punctual ‘whenever’ and one including non-specified time ‘whenever’, and two distracter sentences.
These data will be analyzed to ascertain whether punctual ‘whenever’ is deemed acceptable among young speakers in the south Midlands, and will also address its currency according to location, sex, and race/ethnicity. These findings will provide the basis for further study of the development of punctual ‘whenever’ as a feature of the south Midlands dialect.

References
           Bailey, Guy, and Patricia Cukor-Avila. 1991. The Evidence for Convergence. Paper presented at the spring meeting of the Southeastern Conference of Linguistics, April, Knoxville, TN.
           Crowell, Carol. 1978. A Study of the Usage of the Conjunction whenever among the Cherokees in the Qualla Boundary, North Carolina. Paper presented at the spring meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, April, Knoxville, TN.
           Montgomery, Michael and John M. Kirk. 2001. “My mother, whenever she passed away, she had pneumonia”: The history and functions of whenever. Journal of English Linguistics 29.234-249.