I really need help please( Below are the quotes from each question) 1. Review th
ID: 3459483 • Letter: I
Question
I really need help please( Below are the quotes from each question)
1. Review the research conducted by William Labov regarding Black English Vernacular. Outline his observations and explain why BEV is not an inferior version of Standard American English, but a variety of English that is just as systematic and sophisticated as SAE.
"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 bull**** 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 proceedings of learned academic conferences."
2. Explain the process by which a pidgin becomes a creole in general. Then using both Derek Bickerton's & Jenny Singleton/Elissa Newport's studies, make flowcharts or diagrams for the process in action for the three instances below. (If hand-drawn, upload an image file here)
Hawaiian pidgin/creole
Nicaraguan sign language pidgin/creole
Simon
" The first cases were wrung from two of the more sorrowful episodes of world history, the Atlantic slave trade and indentured servitude in the South Pacific. Perhaps mindful of the Tower of Babel, some of the masters of tobacco, cotton, coffee, and sugar plantations deliberately mixed slaves and laborers from different language backgrounds; others preferred specific ethnicities but had to accept mixtures because that was all that was available. When speakers of different languages have to communicate to carry out practical tasks but do not have the opportunity to learn one another's languages, they develop a makeshift jargon called a pidgin. Pidgins are choppy strings of words borrowed from the language of the colonizers or plantation owners, highly variable in order and with little in the way of grammar. Sometimes a pidgin can become a lingua franca and gradually increase in complexity over decades, as in the "Pidgin English" of the modern South Pacific. (Prince Philip was delighted to learn on a visit to New Guinea that he is referred to in that language as fella belong Mrs.Queen.)
But the linguist Derek Bickerton has presented evidence that in many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full complex language in one fell swoop: all it takes is for a group of children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue. That happened, Bickerton has argued, when children were isolated from their parents and were tended collectively by a worker who spoke to them in the pidgin. Not content to reproduce the fragmentary word strings, the children injected grammatical complexity where none existed before, resulting in a brand-new, richly expressive language. The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called a creole.
Bickerton's main evidence comes from a unique historical circumstance. Though the slave plantations that spawned most creoles are, fortunately, a thing of the remote past, one episode of creolization occurred recently enough for us to study its principal players. Just before the turn of the century there was a boom in Hawaiian sugar plantations, whose demands for labor quickly outstripped the native pool. Workers were brought in from China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, and a pidgin quickly developed. Many of the immigrant laborers who first developed that pidgin were alive when Bickerton interviewed them in the 1970s.
The psycholinguists Jenny Singleton and Elissa Newport have studied a nine-year-old profoundly deaf boy, to whom they gave the pseudonym Simon, and his parents, who are also deaf. Simon's parents did not acquire sign language until the late ages of fifteen and sixteen, and as a result they acquired it badly. In ASL, as in many languages, one can move a phrase to the front of a sentence and mark it with a prefix or suffix (in ASL, raised eyebrows and a lifted chin) to indicate that it is the topic of the sentence. The English sentence Elvis I really like is a rough equivalent. But Simon's parents rarely used this construction and mangled it when they did. For example, Simon's father once tried to sign the thought My friend, he thought my second child was deaf. It came out as My friend thought, my second child, he thought he was deaf—a bit of sign salad that violates not only ASL grammar but, according to Chomsky's theory, the Universal Grammar that governs all naturally acquired human languages (later in this chapter we will see why). Simon's parents had also failed to grasp the verb inflection system of ASL. In ASL, the verb to blow is signed by opening a fist held horizontally in front of the mouth (like a puff of air). Any verb in ASL can be modified to indicate that the action is being done continuously: the signer superimposes an arclike motion on the sign and repeats it quickly. A verb can also be modified to indicate that the action is being done to more than one object (for example, several candles): the signer terminates the sign in one location in space, then repeats it but terminates it at another location. These inflections can be combined in either of two orders: blow toward the left and then toward the right and repeat, or blow toward the left twice and then blow toward the right twice. The first order means "to blow out the candles on one cake, then another cake, then the first cake again, then the second cake again"; the second means "to blow out the candles on one cake continuously, and then blow out the candles on another cake continuously." This elegant set of rules was lost on Simon's parents. They used the inflections inconsistently and never combined them onto a verb two at a time, though they would occasionally use the inflections separately, crudely linked with signs like then. In many ways Simon's parents were like pidgin speakers."
Explanation / Answer
1. Black English Vernacular is a form of dialect of English mostle used by African Americans. BEV uses various words of Standard American English but with different rules of grammar, accent and vocabulary features. BEV is not to be considered inferior to SAE and rather as a different form of the language because BEV does not break any rule, rather it has rules on its own. BEV is a dialect of english that uses English words in sentences, but sentences are formed with a different set of rules. In fact, BEV can be seen as a different language and requires a proper study of rules to use it. BEV is more of an informal dialect of english. BEV is more of a shortened method of speech where some words are not used completely. For example "you are" in SAE becomes "you're" in BEV.But BEV doesn't delete words to the point that it doesn't make sense to an SAE user. Where SAE uses "there" as a dummy subject for copula, BEV uses "it" as meaningless dummy subject for copula.
All the rules of BEV are systematically designed in the same manner as the rule of SAE are. All these rules are different from the rules of SAE and an ardent SAE user might not feel like it makes sense but BEV is a standardized language in itself.