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Asked on February 27, 2021 in Other.
What is some of the sound responses in MT_Head’s answer as an American English student?
One question: Does the Indian English “who all” form a pronoun? In the language, Indian English has no lexical item besides “you all” (though the sequence “you all” obviously still exists in contexts like “Are you all going to go to the movies?” ). At minimum, there is no analogy to “you all”, since that isn’t a lexical item in any range of Indian English I’ve heard (though the sequence “you all” clearly still exists in contexts like “Are you all going to go to the movies? “Who all are going to the movies?”; I don’t have the linguistic vocabulary to accurately describe what’s going on in “who all are going to the movies” but the “all” is the sort of a “modifier” here. “who all” doesn’t strike me as a discrete lexical item.
If you are unfamiliar with Indian English may be surprised to learn that “all” can also modify other interrogatives, which is something that I don’t believe is a feature of southern US English. What are
some of the things you have eaten for dinner? Where did
you spend your first vacation in your life? Why all are you,
a bit of dictionary searching for constructions (in Indian English) does reveal a fair bit of other interrogatives and uses the word “all” as a modifier. I’m not sure whether I’ve personally heard “when all”, “how all”, or “why all”, but a quick bit of
google searching for constructions like “why all are you” does reveal a fair bit of English that uses these other interrogatives with “all” as a modifier.
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