ABSTRACT

We investigate auxiliary omission in progressive aspect interrogatives in spoken British English, e.g., You talking to me? Where we going? What you been doing? In the demographically-sampled component of the original Spoken BNC1994, one-third of second person subject progressive interrogatives are in so-called ‘zero auxiliary’ form. It was also found across the paradigm of subject persons and numbers in English, both in interrogatives and declaratives. Furthermore, these zero auxiliaries associate more with younger age groups and working-class speakers (no difference of gender). In the early-access Sample of the Spoken BNC2014, however, zero auxiliary use is found to have decreased dramatically, such that it is 9% for second person progressive interrogatives, in a corpus of similar design to the Spoken BNC1994. Meanwhile, there is found to be no effect of age group or social class of speaker. We contend that the zero auxiliary persists in frequent usage, albeit in the web domain rather than spoken British English. This is demonstrated with a small survey of Twitter posts.