Article1969

Contraction, Deletion, and Inherent Variability of the English Copula

1,621 citations0/0 files storedLanguage

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

Linguistic Variation and Morphology Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies

Abstract

The following report presents some of the findings of several years’ research on the relations between standard English and the non-standard English used by Negro speakers in various urban ghetto areas. The immediate subject is the status of the copula and auxiliary be in Negro non-standard English. The approach to the problem combines the methods of generative grammar and phonology with techniques for the quantitative analysis of systematic variation. The notion ‘rule of grammar’ is enlarged to include the formal treatment of inherent variation as a part of linguistic structure. Furthermore, a model is presented for the decisive solution of abstract questions of rule form and rule relations, based upon the direct study of linguistic behavior.

Citations in this library

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1,621 citations exist upstream.

References

1964ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF SYNTAX 1968The Sound Pattern of English 1963The Social Motivation of a Sound Change 1970Language development: Form and function in emerging grammars

Cited by

2006Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation 2008Getting off the GoldVarb Standard: Introducing Rbrul for Mixed‐Effects Variable Rule Analysis 2012Models, forests, and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice 2002African American English 1999Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification 2005Regularizing Unpredictable Variation: The Roles of Adult and Child Learners in Language Formation and Change 2004Universal Grammar, statistics or both?1973A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.