It's Giving Syntactic Shift Examining the Syntactic Pattern of It's Giving "X"

Abstract

This paper was originally written for Dr. Heather Bliss’ LING 282W course Writing for Linguistics. The assignment asked students to investigate a research question based on previous writing assignments into an experimental or argument paper. The paper uses APA citation style.

Past findings have shown that the syntactic category of slang terms often have a tendency to shift and deviate from the standard variety of the language. For example, one study exploring the syntactic category of the slang diminutive suffix “-ie” shows that when added to a verb, it forms a noun such as “munchie”—the feeling of hunger after smoking marijuana—from “munch”—to eat snack foods (Gallová, 2021). While this highlights a specific aspect of syntactic variation in slang, further research on the linguistic properties of other slang terms remains warranted. The present study shares a similar focus, aiming to determine the type of syntactic shift shown by the slang phrase “it’s giving X”, with “X” being any particular modifier of the direct object. Specifically, the inquiry addresses whether “X” adheres to a subject-verb-indirect object-direct object (S-V-IO-DO[1]) or simply a subject-verb-direct object (S-V-DO[2]) sentence pattern. To explore this, three Gen Z participants, proficient in Standard Canadian English, performed a test for syntactic distribution. The test involved using their judgment to assess whether the modifier “X” could be plugged into nine sentences featuring the subject “it’s”, the verb “giving”, with or without the addition of the term “me” as the indirect object and “vibes” as the direct object, while maintaining grammaticality. Results indicate that the modifier “X” grammatically conforms to both S-V-IO-DO and S-V-DO sentence patterns, which shows its versatility in syntactic structures.

[1] S-V-IO-DO refers to Subject-Verb-Indirect Object-Direct Object

[2] S-V-DO refers to Subject-Verb-Direct Object