Raffaella Zanuttini (Georgetown University), like Bernstein and Tortora, has
fieldwork experience, with many seminal works on negation as an outgrowth of this
(including her book on negation and clausal structure: Negation and Clausal Structure: A
Comparative Study of Romance Languages (OUP 1997)). Her background in this area
differs from that of Bernstein or Tortora, however, in that the object of study in the
course of her career has been multiple closely-related (Northern Italian) dialects (as
opposed to a focus on single dialects). Her perspective is thus uniquely relevant for the
approach taken in this project, which is the study of a number of closely related varieties.
In addition, Zanuttini is faculty in a Linguistics department that has a long tradition of
scholarship in non-standard varieties of English (we consider in this regard the work of
Ralph Fasold, Robert Hackenberg, and Natalie Schilling-Estes, for example). This is
particularly relevant, since Linguistics at Georgetown is thus predisposed to attract (and
currently has) graduate students interested in working on and doing fieldwork in nonstandard
varieties of English. An added advantage of including Georgetown students is the fact that it is only approximately a six-hour drive to the part of
Appalachia we have been investigating; in other words, Georgetown is situated in a
geographically advantageous location.