Re: USAGE: NATLANG: I've Gots An English Question

Stone Gordonssen wrote:

Steg Belsky wrote:
> >As was repeated many times in various linguistics classes i took in
> >college, one of the salient characteristics of African American
> >Vernacular English, a.k.a. Ebonics, is the lack of final |-s| on (if i
> >remember exactly) possessives, 3rd person singular present verbs, and
> >plurals.
>
> With AAVE/Ebonics having become an occasional element of social pride
> amongst Blacks in the USA, I suspect it has become a bit more
standardized.
>
> >So then what dialect of English *adds* final |-s|s where Standard
> >American says they don't belong?
>
> I can remember it occuring in the English of older Blacks whom I knew as I
> was gowing up in the piedmont of South Carolina. Were it not for this, I'd
> suspect that it was an artifice of "stage Negro" - the English of Blacks
as
> Whites thought it prior to the 1960's.
I'm not sure I've heard things like "gots" in a "real"  (street) context,
and like Stone, I suspect it may be "stage Negro" used to poke fun, perhaps
in a self-deprecating way-- and I have heard blacks use it that way. (Most
of my black friends were/are college grads, so perhaps they don't count...)

In real vernacular, because of final cluster reduction ( desk > des e.g.)
you do hear odd plurals like [des@z] 'desks'-- a carpenter who worked for me
routinely referred to [dZojs@s] = "joists".  I'm sure this is pointed out in
linguistic studies of AAVE.
>
> >"if you've gots the poison, I've gots the remedy"
>
> Except this, in the piedmont, would have been "if you gots the poison, I
> gots the remedy."
>
In Detroit too, I think. And even in colloq. English, "if you got..., I
got..."

Interesting to read the replies from our British friends; I wasn't aware
this (mis)use of -s occurred outside of AAVE.

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