Language

English (en)

Date of Award

5-2026

Author's School

College of Arts & Sciences

Author's Department

Linguistics

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)

Restricted/Unrestricted

Unrestricted

Abstract

Based on observation, personal interaction, and informal interviews/linguistic judgements, this thesis presents the unique and asymmetrical grammaticality patterns of the terms Girl and Miss Girl. To account for these asymmetries, I provide a syntactic framework rooted in Minimalism and Rizzi’s (1997) expanded CP hypothesis, alongside a pragmatic explanation based on Barros and Frank’s (2023) attentional maintenance and attentional shift paradigm.

Miss Girl behaves as a typical R-expression when used as a 3rd person subject, but Girl has a very restricted distribution, inconsistent with either R-expressions or pronouns (it is acceptable as the subject of a main clause, ungrammatical in object position, and usually unacceptable in embedded clauses). While both terms are commonly vocatives, this usage is limited by pragmatic constraints.

I propose that Girl has syntactic and pragmatic topic features. Its movement to satisfy a syntactic [+Top] feature is constrained by Chomsky’s (2000) Phase Impenetrability Condition. Pragmatically, it is only felicitous at transitions that maintain attention on the same discourse referent across discourse segments. Though the terms Girl and Miss Girl originate in both Black and queer slang, I focus primarily on queer Gen-Z speakers, as well as relevant usage changes once co-opted into mainstream use.

Mentor

Mateus Barros

Download

Share

COinS