Regional Variation and Syntactic Derivation of Low-frequency need -passives on Twitter.

This paper examines constructions formed by the verb need taking a passivized complement. While previous dialectological, sociolinguistic, and micro-syntactic analyses have focused primarily on the past-participle complement (need +ED) as a regional syntactic variable, this study expands the purview of need -passives to examine gerund-participle (need +ING) and infinitival (need +TO) complements. It also looks beyond purported need +ED regions to examine need -passive variation in Englishes spoken around the world. Data from Twitter confirm previous findings that need +ED is a productive feature of the US Midland, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Tyneside, England. However, tweets also show that need +ING is produced disproportionately frequently in England and Wales. These results reveal a more complex pattern of need -passive variation in global Englishes than has previously been reported. Additionally, a transitive construction formed with need as a matrix verb is examined and found to co-vary regionally with need +ING. Syntactic analyses of tweets reveal similarities in the ways that need +ED and need +ING vary with need +TO. These findings lead to a proposed syntactic analysis that need +ED and need +ING share the same derivational structure. More generally, the work argues for greater attention in linguistic research to low-frequency features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]