Re: THEORY: free variation [was: Re: [OT] Re: Conlangea Dreaming]

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> Patrick Dunn wrote:
>
> > I still don't completely get the verb system though.  "She was knocking"
> > is apparently simple past, not past progressive.
>
> That could be contamination from Standard English, which of course is
> pervasive in all registers of AAVE, right up to people who speak exactly
> like their white neighbors except for little variants like final /T/
> being [f].
>
> The verb "knock" actually has two senses in StdE anyway, one inherently
> progressive ("to strike a series of blows on a door or similar"), the other
> not ("to strike a blow etc."): to knock, in the first sense, *is* to be
> knocking, in the second sense.
>
> >  "I be knocking" I'm not
> > sure of.  Simple present?  Present progressive?
>
> Habitual/customary. A well-known minimal pair is "He workin but he
> don be workin" = "He's working now, but he's not regularly employed".
Oh, that's brilliant!  I couldn't have a made a conlang better than that.
:)

> > I'd love to sit down with a speaker of Ebonics and listen to it, but my
> > students are terrified to use it with me.  I guess they suspect that I'll
> > tell them to speak proper English, whatever that is.
>
> Not necessarily.  Most AAVE speakers, confronted with non-hostile white
> authority, tend to approximate their interlocutor's dialect as much as
> possible.
I taught a unit on black English once, and got the most incredibly hostile
reaction from both white and black students.  What made it worth while was
a student who came up to me after class and said, "I just wanted to tell
you that I'm glad you taught that essay.  My mom talks like that, and I'm
glad to find it out isn't wrong."

I'd say that approximation of dialect occurs with just about everyone.
Although I speak what I call "farmer talk" most of the time, in class I
tend to use academic English.  My students try to immitate academic
English, with often amusing results.  Stil, that's how one learns.

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