| 单词 | y'all |
| 例句 | y'all pronounUSAGE y'all This sturdy Southernism is most logically y'all, not ya'll. Only the you of you all is contracted. And in modern print sources, y'all is ten times as common. So ya'll (which misleadingly resembles he'll, she'll, and we'll) deserves an edit—e.g.: “ ‘Ya'll [read Y'all ] have got to help me a lot,’ Bentley, a registered nurse at Chalmette Medical Centers, told the students about class planning.” ( Times-Picayune [New Orleans]; Feb. 25, 1997.) In the late twentieth century, some writers began spelling the term without an apostrophe: yall. This spelling is not yet widespread (and not recommended). Why has the spelling been so much trouble? Y'all is the only contraction in English in which a stressed form is contracted to an unstressed one. Although the traditional use of y'all is plural, and although many Southerners have stoutly rejected the idea that it's ever used as a singular, there does seem to be strong evidence that it can refer to a single person—for example, •See y'all later spoken to someone without a companion. One possibility is that the speaker means “you and anyone else who may be with you” or “you and anyone else who comes along.” Another possibility is that y'all may in fact refer to one person. Getting at the truth depends on understanding the speaker's state of mind. Many speakers in the South and Southwest, even highly educated ones, use the uncontracted you all as the plural form of you. This is a convenient usage, since you alone can be either singular or plural—and therefore is sometimes ambiguous. True, you all is unlikely to spread beyond regional usage. But speakers who grew up with the phrase won't be easily dispossessed of it. It's handy, and it's less susceptible to raised eyebrows than y'all. There is, however, a noticeable tendency in urban areas to replace this phrase with you guys. This may have resulted from the great influx of a geographically diverse population in major cities such as Dallas throughout the 1980s and 1990s, coupled with a growing sense among natives that you all and y'all signal provincialism.Usage notes show additional guidance on finer points of English usage. |
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