VARIATION IN THE INTERPRETATION AND USE OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH PREVERBALDONECONSTRUCTION
| Autor: | J. Michael Terry |
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| Rok vydání: | 2010 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | American Speech. 85:3-32 |
| ISSN: | 1527-2133 0003-1283 |
| Popis: | This article examines the variable judgments that African American english speakers in Wise, North Carolina, give simple preverbal done sentences modified by definite past-time denoting adverbials, as in John done baked a cake yesterday. A single speaker might judge this sentence as perfectly grammatical one day, only to judge the same or a similar sentence as fully ungrammatical the next. The article develops a synchronic analysis of this variability based on semantic type shifting. Additionally, that account is used to reconcile other researchers' reports of different judgments coming from different regions and to help explain previously published data regard- ing the construction's frequency of use. Further, the article proposes that the same syntactic and semantic mechanisms be used to account for a separate, although related, case of variation within the done construction. At issue here is whether adver - bially modified done constructions such as Mary done lived in Chapel Hill for three years have perfect of persistent situation readings. Different researchers have answered this question differently, with a number reporting tentative and unclear judgments similar to the Wise data. in a recent article titled "Sociolinguistic Folklore in the Study of African American english," Walt Wolfram (2007) argues convincingly that, although linguists have served society well by refuting folk theories about African American english (AAe), in an ironic twist, they have, at the same time, unin- tentionally participated in the construction of what he calls sociolinguistic folklore by creating their own myths about variation and change in AAe. As a part of his broader argument, Wolfram describes three such myths—the supraregional myth, the language change myth, and the social stratification myth—and uses a variety of types of data to dispute them. he finds unwar- ranted assumptions of homogeneity undergirding each of these myths. For example, while many of the primary structural features that distinguish the vernacular speech of African Americans from their european American neighbors are, in fact, shared by regionally disparate African American com- munities, the supraregional myth takes this observation and turns it into |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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