Creoles at the intersection of variable processes: -t,d deletion and past-marking in the Jamaican mesolect

1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter L. Patrick
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
American English ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Environmental Constraints ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Phonological Process ◽  
Jamaican Creole

ABSTRACT-t,d deletion is a well-known variable phonological process subject to the influence of both external social factors and internal structural constraints, including phonetic environmental and morphosyntactic effects. Its profile of variation has been widely investigated in American English dialects. However, it interacts with another grammatical process – the regular affixation of final /-t, -d/ as a past-tense marker – that strongly distinguishes these dialects from English-related creoles, where past-marking by this mechanism is infrequent or non-occurrent. Investigation of -t,d deletion in mesolectal Jamaican Creole (JC) thus raises important questions about the intersection of variable processes, the generality of phonetic environmental constraints, and the degree of difference between English-related creoles and metropolitan standard and non-standard Englishes.

Zero Marking of Past Tense in Child African American English

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 173-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Lee ◽  
Janna B. Oetting
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Grammatical Function

Zero marking of the simple past is often listed as a common feature of child African American English (AAE). In the current paper, we review the literature and present new data to help clinicians better understand zero marking of the simple past in child AAE. Specifically, we provide information to support the following statements: (a) By six years of age, the simple past is infrequently zero marked by typically developing AAE-speaking children; (b) There are important differences between the simple past and participle morphemes that affect AAE-speaking children's marking options; and (c) In addition to a verb's grammatical function, its phonetic properties help determine whether an AAE-speaking child will produce a zero marked form.

Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English

Corpora ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao ◽  
Peter Collins
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.

Mapping Southern American English, 1861-1865

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
American English ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Regional Features ◽  
Individual Letter ◽  
Southern American English

Since April 2015 is the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War, now is a particularly appropriate time to review the progress of the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL) project and to suggest directions it might go in the future. Since 2007, we have located and collected images of nearly 11,000 letters and transcribed over 9,000 of these, totaling well over four million words. Of the transcribed letters, just over 6,000 were written by southerners (490 individual letter writers), a corpus extensive enough to begin identifying and describing what features were distinctively Southern in 19th-century American English. We have already mapped many of these features that are especially common in southern letters, for example, fixing to, howdy, past tense/past participle hope ‘helped’, qualifier tolerable, intensifier mighty, pronoun hit, and the noun heap. By way of comparison, we also have a somewhat smaller but rapidly growing collection of 3,000 transcribed letters written by individuals from northern states, and variant features from these letters are also being mapped. The work at present is very preliminary; there are thousands of additional letters to be collected and transcribed, particularly from northern states and from states west of the Mississippi. However, by mapping variants from letters that have already been transcribed, we can begin to get a better understanding of regional differences, as well as how regional features spread westward in the decades before the Civil War. We can also begin to obtain some sense of how American English in general, and particularly its regional dialects, may have changed since the mid 19th century. This article presents a preview of a number of those findings.

scholarly journals Structural and environmental constraints on reduction of paired appendages among vertebrates

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loredana Macaluso ◽  
Giorgio Carnevale ◽  
Raffaello Casu ◽  
Daniel Pietrocola ◽  
Andrea Villa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Limb Loss ◽  
Appendicular Skeleton ◽  
Environmental Constraints ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Teleost Fishes ◽  
Complex Environments ◽  
Complex Environment ◽  
Pectoral Fins ◽  
Squamate Reptiles ◽  
Complex Habitat

Abstract Burrowing habits or complex environments have generally been considered as potential drivers acting on reduction and loss of the appendicular skeleton among vertebrates. Herein, we suggest that this might be the case for lissamphibians and squamates, but that fin loss in fishes is usually prevented by important structural constraints, because pectoral fins are commonly used to control rolling and pitching. We provide an overview of the distribution of paired appendage reduction across vertebrates while examining the ecological affinities of finless and limbless clades. We analysed the correlation between lifestyle and fin or limb loss using the discrete comparative analysis. The resulting Bayesian factors indicate strong evidence of correlation between: (1) pectoral-fin loss and coexistence of anguilliform elongation and burrowing habits or complex habitat in teleost fishes; and (2) limb loss and a burrowing or grass-swimming lifestyle in squamate reptiles and lissamphibians. These correlations suggest that a complex environment or a fossorial habit is a driving force leading to appendage loss. The only style of locomotion that is functional even in the absence of paired appendages is the undulatory one, which is typical of all elongated reptiles and lissamphibians, but certainly less common in teleost fishes.

scholarly journals Phonetic convergence towards American English by Indian agents in international service encounters

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-274
Author(s):  
Claire Cowie ◽  
Anna Pande
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
American English ◽  
Service Encounters ◽  
International Service ◽  
Call Centres ◽  
Phonetic Convergence ◽  
It Workers ◽  
Indian Agents

Abstract In outsourced voice-based services (call centres are a typical example), an agent providing a service is likely to accommodate their speech to that of the customer. In services outsourced to India, as in other postcolonial settings, the customer accent typically does not have a place in that agent’s repertoire. This presents an opportunity to test whether exposure to the customer accent through telephone work promotes phonetic convergence, and/or whether social factors are implicated in convergence. In this map task experiment, 16 IT workers from Pune (half of whom regularly spoke to American colleagues on the telephone) gave directions to American followers. There was evidence of imitation of the bath vowel with an American addressee. However, imitation did not depend on exposure alone. Attitudes to American English, social networks and individuals’ sense of themselves as performers affected their behaviour in the experiment.

scholarly journals td-deletion in British English: New evidence for the long-lost morphological effect

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Maciej Baranowski ◽  
Danielle Turton
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
American English ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Morphological Effect ◽  
British English ◽  
Glottal Stop ◽  
New Evidence

ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes td-deletion, the process whereby coronal stops /t, d/ are deleted after a consonant at the end of the word (e.g., best, kept, missed) in the speech of 93 speakers from Manchester, stratified for age, social class, gender, and ethnicity. Prior studies of British English have not found the morphological effect—more deletion in monomorphemic mist than past tense missed—commonly observed in American English. We find this effect in Manchester and provide evidence that the rise of glottal stop replacement in postsonorant position in British English (e.g., halt, aunt) may be responsible for the reduction in the strength of this effect in British varieties. Glottaling blocks deletion, and, because the vast majority of postsonorant tokens are monomorphemic, the higher rates of monomorpheme glottaling dampens the typical effect of deletion in this context. These findings indicate organization at a higher level of the grammar, while also showing overlaid effects of factors such as style and word frequency.

scholarly journals How snuck sneaked into English and drug is still dragging behind: A corpus study on the usage of new past tense forms for sneak and drag in British and American English

English Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 51-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Søballe Horslund
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Past Tense Form ◽  
New Form

Language observers may have noticed the existence of two past tense forms for the verb to sneak in American English, sneaked and snuck. Interestingly, both forms have not always coexisted; the original form is sneaked, and snuck has only recently become a real competitor for sneaked (Hogg, 1988: 31–32). The verb to drag seems to be somewhat in the same situation with the original past tense form dragged as well as the new form drug (Bybee & Moder, 1983: 252). However, drug is much less frequent than snuck. Murray's (1998) study on the attitudes towards snuck and drug suggests some difference in the usage of these forms across registers.

AN INTRODUCTION TO PIDGINS AND CREOLES. John Holm. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xxi + 282. $69.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-166
Author(s):  
J. Clancy Clements
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Haitian Creole ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Creole English ◽  
Jamaican Creole

Although the primary focus of this introduction is the Atlantic pidgins and creoles, it contains considerable information on many other pidgins and creoles as well. Chapter 1 includes the definitions of terms, which are clear and concise with the exception of the notions of semi-creole and creoloid, which are somewhat vague, and the notion of interlanguage, which is not necessarily characterizable as unstable, especially if it fossilizes. Chapter 2 largely mirrors its comprehensive counterpart, Holm (1988). New in this volume is the mention of the earliest known attestation of a creole language (Martinique creole in 1671), the shortening, partial rewriting, or both of the monogenesis sections, and the identification of other trends. Chapter 3 succinctly underscores the importance of social factors in the creation and characterization of pidgins and creoles, without which, according to Holm, they cannot be defined. It also includes sociohistorical synopses of seven languages (i.e., Angolar Creole Portuguese, Papiamentu Creole Spanish, Negerhollands Creole Dutch, Haitian Creole French, Jamaican Creole English, Tok Pisin, and Nubi Creole Arabic).

Developments in the Use of the English Present Perfect

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 307-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao
Keyword(s):  
Multivariate Analyses ◽  
American English ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Past Event ◽  
Gradual Shift ◽  
Transitive Verbs ◽  
Direct Results ◽  
Late Modern

This article examines developments in the use of the present perfect (PP) with the auxiliary have in standard British and American English from 1750 to the present day, drawing data from the drama section of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). Multivariate analyses were conducted to examine changes in the type of linguistic contexts that favor the choice of the construction over its main competitor, the simple past tense. A number of significant changes were identified, including a stronger tendency for the have-PP to occur in temporally specified and negative contexts, and to become less favored by transitive verbs and events with direct results (e.g., break, kill, lose, arrive). The findings are interpreted as an indication of a slow functional reconfiguration that contours the construction’s continued grammaticalization. It is suggested that there has been, since the Late Modern English period, a gradual shift in the nature of the construction’s “current relevance,” from the persistence of the present result of a past event to the situational constitution of the “extended-now” interval.

Difference Versus Deficit in Child African American English

1998 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 96-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry N. Seymour ◽  
Linda Bland-Stewart ◽  
Lisa J. Green
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
Language Disorders ◽  
African American English ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
The Past ◽  
Conversational Language

We propose that shared features (noncontrastive) between African American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE) may be more diagnostically salient than features not shared (contrastive) when identifying children of AAE language backgrounds with language disorders. The syntax of child speakers of AAE with language disorders (LD) and child speakers of AAE without language disorders (NLD) were compared. Syntactic features were transcribed from conversational language samples of seven LD and seven NLD children, and these features were classified according to their overlapping relationship with SAE. Shared features between AAE and SAE were designated as "noncontrastive" and features not shared as "contrastive". The production of several noncontrastive linguistic features were significantly different between groups, whereas group differences were nonsignificant for all contrastive features, with the exception of the past tense /ed/ morpheme.

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