Content area
Full Text
Purpose: Overt marking of BE in nonmainstream adult dialects of English is influenced by a number of linguistic constraints, including the structure's person, number, tense, contractibility, and grammatical function. In the current study, the authors examined the effects of these constraints on overt marking of BE in children as a function of their non-mainstream English dialect and age.
Method: The data were language samples from 62 children, ages 4-6 years; 24 children spoke African American English (AAE), and 38 spoke Southern White English (SWE). Analyses included analysis of variance and logistic regression.
Results: Rates of overt marking varied by the children's dialect but not their age. Although the person, number, tense, and grammatical function of BE influenced the children's rates of marking, the nature and magnitude of the influence differed by the children's dialect. For AAE-speaking children, contractibility also influenced their marking of BE.
Conclusions: Consistent with the adult literature, the current study showed that AAE- and SWE-speaking children marked BE in ways that differed from each other and from what has been documented for child speakers of Mainstream American English. These findings show stability in the use of BE in AAE and SWE that spans different generations and different dialect communities.
Key Words: children, morphology, cultural and linguistic diversity
(ProQuest: ... denotes formula omitted.)
Adult African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) differ from Mainstream American English (MAE) in the production of copular and auxiliary forms of BE. Unlike MAE, overt marking of BE is not obligatory for adults who speak AAE or SWE. In fact, it is perfectly acceptable in these two dialects for both overtly marked (e.g., he is happy) and zero-marked BE (he 0 happy) to be produced. However, overt versus zero marking of BE does not occur randomly. Instead, the type of marking produced is probabilistic and is tied to the linguistic characteristics of the context surrounding the BE form.
Effects of linguistic contexts on AAE and SWE speakers' overt marking of BE are commonly referred to as linguistic constraints because various contexts are thought to constrain (or influence) when a speaker produces-or does not produce-an overtly marked form (for a review of constraint literature and earlier work by Labov and others, see Sankoff, Tagliamonte, & Smith,...