"Hey, y'guys!": A diachronic usage-based approach to changes in American English address

Abstract

This dissertation adopts a functional, usage-based perspective on language to highlight key changes in American English address over the past century, especially the development of 'you guys' and its expansion across second-person plural contexts. Based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (among other corpora), the study tracks the increasing usage, gradual restructuring, semantic generalization, and shifting registers of 'you guys', including the interactions of those changes as the form has grammaticalized. This work offers an explanation, therefore, as to why 'you guys' has been uniquely reshaped into a pronominal unit with non-masculine meanings in American English, while other appositive uses such as 'you men' and 'you fellows' have retained their structural and semantic properties with far greater fidelity.

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