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Maps, experiments, and other stuff from SeeTweet, the Twitter mapper.
Recent Tweets
@MGrammar
“needs (to be) fixed”.
Another strange bit of my dialect is that I can say things like “The chair needs fixed” where speakers of Standard American English would say it either “needs to be fixed” or “needs fixing”. This particular syntactic structure is a pretty neat one; in some dialects, it generalizes to “wants fixed” or “could use fixed”. In fact, there’s a hierarchy to it. If someone accepts “the cat wants fed”, they’ll also accept “the cat needs fed”, but not necessarily the other way around.
The “needs done” construction is geographically localized to the Midwest and Applachia, as discussed in a series of studies by Murray, Fraser, and Simon. SeeTweet confirms this localization.
