Hello!
My name is Emily and I live in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula.
I don't know about UP Finns, but I know some Minnesota Norwegians who don't use objects for some prepositions. For example, "We will leave for church soon. Do you want to go with?"
I don't know the details, but I know someone who does! I found this abstract online from a 2012 paper presented at the American Dialect Society, Portland, 2012. I'm sure if you contact Mr Rankinen, he would be happy to share details. Please note that these abstracts include our very own Mr. Grant Barrett, who also presented on Restarting the public conversation about language.
Wil Rankinen (Indiana U).
Where’d the preposition go? An account of locative prepositional deletion in Michigan’s UP speech
community.Among monolingual English speakers from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (U.P.), it is not uncommon to hear
the deletion of such locative prepositions as ‘to’, e.g., “I went town yesterday”. The paper will first show
the prescriptive pressures and social situation surrounding this phenomenon. The analysis will then
describe the linguistic constraints of the phenomenon in relation to its social, semantic and syntactic
sensitivities: formality/commonality, and verb types, tenses, and determiner phrases. In addition to giving a
first-time descriptive analysis of this phenomenon, evidence collected from perceptual acceptability rating
tasks will support its existence and use among this monolingual English-speaking community.
EmmettRedd said
I don't know about UP Finns, but I know some Minnesota Norwegians who don't use objects for some prepositions. For example, "We will leave for church soon. Do you want to go with?"
This is so interesting - I thought it was French influence, as I've mostly heard it among people speaking English in Belgium, but lately I heard or read it from a monolingual American as well. Is it really more particular to Minnesota and/or those of Norwegian descent?
For nonnative speakers of any language, prepositions (or their equivalents) are among the most difficult things to get right. This case is particularly interesting because it focuses on monolingual English speakers. I don't know of any monolingual English speakers who do this. From the abstract it sounds as if it is a regional dialect that may have developed from a common ethnicity, but that is no longer necessarily limited.