Te 407 Linguistic Variance Handout

TE 407: Emily Mullins SGI: Linguistic Variance "Linguistic Variation in Spike Lee's School Daze" (1987) by Margaret Thomas Focus: That powerful social and psychological forces drive speakers both toward and away from a standard language, resulting in a complex and dynamic interplay of standard and non-standard usage both for individual speakers and within speech communities The narrative concerns social and political tensions between two groups, "the Haves" and "the Have-Nots." The "Haves" are light skinned and upper class; the "Have-Nots" are darker-skinned and some of them are the first in their families to attend college. The particular scene we will look at has a number of properties that make it a rich source of data about language variation. Please look out for: Examples of speech used in different social contexts Language of intimates (Dap and friends talking together in the car) Conventionalized service language (The students interacting with the waitress) Language between strangers (the locals in confrontation with the students) Examples of speech display in a range of affects Playful joking on the way to KFC Language communicating veiled resentment from the waitress Language charged with explicit hostility in the clash with the locals Students' sobered conversation on their way back to the campus Examples of different speech acts Language is used… to tease, inform, request, reject, challenge, conciliate, insult, deny, attach, support, threaten, reflect, agree, and disagree Questions to Consider: Can you distinguish instances where speakers shift speech styles between AAV and Standard English (code-switching)? Where, why, and by whom does code-switching take place? Ex: Look closely at how Monroe speaks in the car, and the conversation between Jordan and a local in regards to the saltshaker; How does he start the conversation? How does he respond? How do the locals speak in comparison to the "Have-Nots"? Why might a speaker employ one style rather than another? Some Helpful Features of Standard Dialect AAV: Consonants /t,d,s,z/ occurring at the end of words are often deleted or weakened Test becomes what can be represented orthographically as tes'; cold as col'; seat, seed, and see can become homonyms But because linguistic behavior is so complex, not all such consonants are equally subject to deletion. For example, an omission of final consonants is

less likely in AAV when they carry grammatical significance, as in looked and closed where /t/ and /d/ signal past tense. In AAV, Standard English diphthongs (vowels which exhibit a noticeable change in quality within a single syllable, like the /aI/ in nice or the /au/ in house) often become long "pure" vowels ("monophthongs"). Nice may be pronounced as /naIs/ and house as /haIs/ Speakers of AAV often substitute the voiced alveolar stop /d/ for the voiced interdental fricative /ð/ so that there sounds like dare Speakers of AAV may delete the liquids /r/ and /l/ after vowels ("in postvocalic position"), as in /wiI/ (will) and /maid/ (mired). Negative concord ("Double negative") is often used Negative inversion is utilized; a rule which moves a negative modal into sentence-initial position around an indefinite subject in declarative utterances, as in Can't nobody tag you then Invariant be indicating habitual or durative aspect, as in … cause the office be closed on weekends Null be signaling stativity, as in She pretty AAV distinguishes between the habitual aspect of She be busy and the stativity of She busy (here indicating a temporary state) where standard English has only the ambiguous She's busy Loss of Standard English genitive case-marking as in They daddy in the house or There go Willie mother right there Frequent absence of nominal plural -s (Two boy just left) and of third-person singular verbal -s in simple present tense (My father, he work at Ford) Use of the negative copula, ain't