languages (Ebonics)

On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 02:55:52PM -0500, John Wilson wrote: Sure thing. I'll cheaply cop-out and quote directly from Steven Pinker's excellent work for the layman "The Language Instinct" (Pinker, 1994, pp. 29-31) [Please note that there's some potentially offensive language below. Any typos are mine alone]: Here is an example, from an interview conducted by the linguist William Labov on a stoop in Harlem. The interviewee is Larry, the roughest member of a teenage gang called the Jets. (Labov observed in his scholarly article that "for most readers of this paper, first contact with Larry would produce some fairly negative reactions on both sides.") You know, like some people say if you're good an' shit, your spirit goin' t'heaven ... 'n' if you bad, your spirit goin' to hell. Well, bullshit! Your spirit goin' to hell anyway, good or bad. [Why?] Why? I'll tell you why. 'Cause, you see, doesn' nobody really know that it's a God, y'know, 'cause I mean I have seen black gods, white gods, all color gods, and don't knobody know it's really a God. An' when they be sayin' if you good, you goin' t'heaven, tha's bullshit, 'cause you ain't goin' to no heaven, 'cause it ain't no heaven for you to go to. [...jus' suppose that there is a God, would he be white or black?] He'd be white, man. [Why?] Why? I'll tell you why. 'Cause the average whitey out here got everything, you dig? And the nigger ain't got shit, y'know? Y'understan'? So -- um -- for -- in order for *that* to happen, you know it ain't no black God that's doin' that bullshit. First contact with Larry's grammar may produce negative reactions as well, but to a linguist it punctiliously conforms to the rules of the dialect called Black English Vernacular (BEV). The most linguistically interesting thing about the dialect is how linguistically uninteresting it is: if Labov did not have to call attention to it to debunk the claim that ghetto children lack true linguistic competence, it would have been filed away as just another language. Where Standard American English (SAE) uses "there" as a meaningless dummy subject for the copula, BEV uses "it" as a meaningless dummy subject for the copula (compare SAE's "There's really a God" with Larry's "It's really a God"). Larry's negative concord ("You ain't goin' to no heaven") is seen in many languages, such as French ("ne ... pas"). Like speakers of SAE, Larry inverts subjects and auxiliaries in nondeclarative sentences, but the exact set of the sentence types allowing inversion differs slightly. Larry and other BEV speakers invert subjects and auxiliaries in negative main clauses like "Don't nobody know"; SAE speakers invert them only in questions like "Doesn't anybody know?" and a few other sentence types. BEV allows its speakers the option of deleting copulas ("If you bad"); this is not random laziness but a systematic rule that is virtually identical to the contraction rule in SAE that reduces "He is" to "He's", "You are" to "You're", and "I am" to "I'm". In both dialects, "be" can erode only in certain kinds of sentences. No SAE speaker would try the following contractions: Yes he is! --> Yes he's! I don't care what you are. --> I don't care what you're. Who is it? --> Who's it? For the same reasons, no BEV speaker would try the following deletions: Yes he is! --> Yes he! I don't care what you are. --> I don't care what you. Who is it? --> Who it? Note, too, that BEV speakers are not just more prone to eroding words. BEV speakers use the full forms of certain auxiliaries ("I have seen"), whereas SAE speakers usually contract them ("I've seen"). And as we would expect from comparisons between languages, there are areas in which BEV is more precise than standard English. "He be working" means that he generally works, perhaps that he has a regular job; "He working" means only that he is working at the moment that the sentence is uttered. In SAE, "He is working" fails to make that distinction. [...] Another project of Labov's involved tabulating the percentage of grammatical sentences in tape recordings of speech in a variety of social classes and social settings. "Grammatical," for these purposes, means "well-formed according to consistent rules in the dialect of the speakers." For example, if a speaker asked the question "Where are you going?", the respondent would not be penalized for answering "To the store", even though it is in some sense not a complete sentence. Such ellipses are obviously part of the grammer of conversational English; the alternative, "I am going to the store", sounds stilted and is almost never used. "Ungrammatical" sentences, by this definition, include randomly broken-off sentence fragments, tongue-tied hemming and hawing, slips of the tongue, and other forms of word salad. The results of Labov's tabulation are enlightening. The great majority of sentences were grammatical, especially in casual speech, with higher percentages of grammatical sentences in working-class speech than in middle-class speech. The highest percentage of ungrammatical sentences was found in the proceedings of learned academic conferences. For those on the list who are at all interested in linguistics, this is a fabulous book. It's still in print and fairly easy to find. Steven Pinker is quite highly regarded among linguists for being able to explain linguistic concepts in regular ol' speech. -Seth -- "As a general rule, the man in the habit of murdering | Seth Morabito bookbinders, though he performs a distinct service | sethm(a)loomcom.com to society, only wastes his own time and takes no | personal advantage." -- Kenneth Grahame (1898) | Perth ==> *