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

>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.
I'm always suspicious of "all", "every", etc. (overt or implied) when
applied to language across any dispersed groups of people.

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.

>"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."

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