English or can be used in two different situations, which are illustrated with questions in (1) and (2). One of these is a situation where “both” would be a legitimate answer, as in (1).

(1)

Q: Would you like ketchup or mustard on your hot dog?

A: Both.

In other situations, or is used to mean that one option must be chosen over the other, as in (2).

(2)

Q: Should I wear the blue shorts or the black?

A: #Both.

In most cases, we can tell which sense of or is meant from context. For example, it’s reasonable to have a hotdog with both ketchup and mustard in (1), but it would be unexpected for someone to wear two pairs of shorts in (2).

However, some speakers have strategies that make it clear which sense of or they mean. One strategy that can serve this function is Alternative one. So if a speaker said:

(3) Q: Would you like ketchup or mustard, one?

This would mean that (for some reason) you can only have either ketchup or mustard.

Alternative one seems to be related to a similar construction used by a broader range of speakers, one or the other. Sentences (3) and (4) mean the same thing for speakers who have them.

(4) Q: Would you like ketchup or mustard, one or the other?

Who says this?

Alternative one has been said to originate in Appalachian English (Montgomery, 2004). The distribution of the form may be even broader, though; Cassidy & Hall (1991) claim that this is primarily used by speakers in the South and South Midlands (which would include Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, DC, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and parts of Missouri, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware). Data collected by YGDP largely corroborate this claim. Survey participants judged sentences on a scale of 1 (unacceptable) to 5 (acceptable). The following map shows where Alternative one had the highest acceptability judgments on average.

Map created by Guilherme Medeiros Costa Pereira on February 6th, 2025

See Pereira (2024) for more detailed maps which reveal statistically significant hotspots for many of these places.

Syntactic Properties

Distribution

Alternative one seems to always occur immediately after a disjunction. This isn’t necessarily at the end of a sentence. Sentences like (5) are acceptable, even though it has material after one (in this case all the time).

(5)

They had revival meeting morning and evening or morning and night one all the time. (Montgomery & Hall, 2004)

It could be relevant that the material after one is an adjunct, not an argument: all the time could be removed without the sentence becoming ungrammatical.

According to Montgomery (2006), many Alternative one speakers reject Alternative one when it occurs with negation, as in (6).

(6)

*I didn't see Charlotte or George, one. (Montgomery 2006:156)

Alternative one can also be used in interrogatives, such as (3), above, or (7), below:

(7)

Would you like coffee or tea, one? (YGDP survey 13, 2020)

However, this sentence is less widely accepted than declaratives with Alternative one: (7) was found to have lower acceptability ratings in our survey than He was in Tennessee or Kentucky, one. It is also found much less frequently in English corpora (Luna 2024), which suggests overall that interrogatives with Alternative one are more marked than declaratives.

Types of disjuncts

Interrogative one can occur with lots of different types of disjuncts (the two elements linked by or). If the disjuncts are nominal, they can be definite, indefinite, pronouns, or proper nouns, as shown in (8)–(10). Note that all the examples in this section come from Montgomery & Hall (2004).

(8)

I told the boys in the morning we would have [_DPindef a coon race] or [_DPindef a bear race] one.

(9)

I was a-batchin’ and he come over there, said I had to stay with [_Pronoun him] or [_Proper-noun Fred], one.

(10)

% I’ll bring back [_DPdef the doctor] or [_DPdef his instruments], one.

(10) shows that one co-occurs with disjuncts with different determiners: the in the doctor versus his in his instruments. Also, the doctor is singular and his instruments is plural: grammatical number doesn’t seem to prevent Alternative one from being used for all speakers. However, according to Montgomery (2006), many Alternative one speakers find (10) unacceptable.

Alternative one can co-occur with verb phrases:

(11)

They were [_VP a-sangin’] or [_VP cattle huntin’], one.

The verb phrases can have different voice: in (12), get killed is in the passive voice, whereas kill them is in the active voice.

(12)

All I can do is [_VP get killed] or [_VP kill them], one.

(13)–(15) show that Alternative one can occur with a range of disjunct types. In (13), the disjoined elements are adjective phrases; in (14), they are prepositional phrases; and in (15), they are full clauses.

(13)

Yeah, that hearing aid, it’s either [_AdjP too high] or [_AdjP too low] one.

(14)

He either went [_PP to Medlin] or [_PP to Bradshaw’s] one.

(15)

She said her son moved back in with her and [_CP he has to go to Morristown] or [_CP his wife brings ‘em up] one.

Similar/related constructions

Alternative one may be derived from one or the other, as suggested by Montgomery (2004), and supported by Luna (2024). Like Alternative one, one or the other appears with a range of types of disjuncts, including nominals (16), verbs (17), adjectives (18), and sentences (19).

(16)

She wore [_DP his hoodie] or [_DP a jacket], one or the other.

(17)

She [_VP bought it] or [_VP stole it], one or the other.

(18)

Their hair was [_AdjP blue] or [_AdjP green], one or the other.

(19)

[_CP he dropped his coffee] or [_CP the dog knocked over the table], one or the other.

Also like Alternative one, one or the other seems to be comparatively worse in interrogatives. There are contexts where the meaning of (20) would be clear and appropriate (say, a flight attendant who has cheese sandwiches or turkey sandwiches, but no cheese-and-turkey sandwiches), but it appears to be more marked than the non-interrogative uses of one or the other in (21). This is according to an informal poll of (Midlands) British English speakers who use tuther, a contraction of the other often used by speakers in the Midlands and North of England.

(20)

? Would you like a cheese or turkey sandwich, one or tuther/the other?

(21)

There were four or five people, one or tuther/the other.

This suggests that Alternative one is a part of an otherwise-silent DisjP, where only one is pronounced and there is a silent or the other (Luna, 2024).

Predictions of this analysis

If this is correct, we might expect that Alternative one patterns with one or the other in being allowed in sentence-final positions that are not immediately after the second conjunct if the element between them is closely related to the arguments (not as distant as an adjunct—recall the discussion surrounding (5) above). That is, given that (22a) is grammatical for some speakers as well as (22b), we predict that both (23b) and (23a) should be acceptable to users of Alternative one.

(22)

a) She had ketchup or mustard on her hotdog, one or the other.

b) She had ketchup or mustard, one or the other, on her hotdog.

(23)

a) She had ketchup or mustard on her hotdog, one.

b) She had ketchup or mustard, one, on her hotdog.

As of now, we have not tested whether this prediction is correct for speakers who have Alternative one in their grammar.

Page contributed by Romany Amber on 2025-02-06

Please cite this page as: Amber, Romany. 2025. Alternative one. Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America. (Available online at http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/alternative-one. Accessed on YYYY-MM-DD).

References