Beyond the immediate relevance to the syntactician, the approach taken and the research questions posed in this study promise to yield heretofore undisclosed data (that is, data which may not necessarily emerge using sociolinguistic techniques), which ultimately can be shared by the entire scientific community. Materials collected through fieldwork will be disseminated in several ways, as these materials will also be of interest to linguists studying sociolinguistic variation and discourse analysis, as well as to anyone interested in Appalachian language and culture (such as anthropologists, sociologists, and folklorists). Taped interviews (consisting of audio CDs and transcriptions) will be placed in the Archives of Appalachia (at East Tennessee State University), where they will be available for examination and/or borrowing. In addition, an electronically accessible database of our empirical findings will be made available via the word-wide web. The analyses of the data will also be presented at linguistics conferences and published in linguistics journals.
Finally, a vital contribution of the type of work proposed here is the documentation and preservation of data from a set of possibly endangered minority dialects. Linguistic study of non-standard, and often stigmatized, linguistic varieties promotes the legitimacy and recognizes the heritage of the varieties and their associated cultures.