The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. Moreover, sentences like In order for that to happen, you know it ain’t no black God that’s doin’ that bullshit show that Larry’s speech uses the full inventory of grammatical paraphernalia that computer scientists struggle unsuccessfully to duplicate (relative clauses, complement structures, clause subordination, and so on), not to mention some fairly sophisticated theological argumentation.
    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 grammar 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