Meet Me on Tomorrow by Your Mama’s House: A sociolinguistic investigation of phrasal constructions in New Orleans English

• Documents novel prepositional constructions in New Orleans English. • Combines self-report survey with corpus and social media data. • Finds ‘by [residence]’ and ‘for [time]’ are stable across social groups. • ‘On [temporal deixis]’ is ethnically stratified. • Offers new evidence of morphosyntactic variation in a Southern US variety. Phrasal constructions are an underlooked aspect of language variation and change, in part likely due to the challenges of examining syntactic variation: lower frequency compared to phonological and morphological features, questionable semantic equivalences across phrasal constructions, and an interest in sound change amongst variationist sociolinguists. In this study, we examine three phrasal constructions in New Orleans English that demonstrate unusual employment of prepositions: ‘ by [residence]’ (e.g. ‘I went by your mama’s house yesterday’ meaning ‘I stopped in for a visit at your mama’s house yesterday’), ‘ for [time] ’ (e.g. ‘the store closes for six o’clock’ meaning ‘the store closes at six o’clock’), and ‘on [temporal deixis]’ (e.g. ‘I’ve got a doctor’s appointment on tomorrow’ meaning ‘I’ve got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow’). Using a self-report survey of New Orleanians, and spoken and written production data from corpora and social media, we document usage and distribution of these phrasal constructions across demographic groups, noting that while all 3 features appear stable across generations in New Orleans, ‘on [temporal deixis]’ appears to be used more by Black and Creole respondents than white respondents. We situate these results within the context of local linguistic change in New Orleans English, and broader research on syntactic variation.