TY - JOUR
T1 - Defining the envelope of linguistic variation
T2 - The case of “don't count” forms in the copula analysis of African American Vernacular English
AU - Blake, Renée
PY - 1997/3
Y1 - 1997/3
N2 - Ever since Labov, Cohen, Robbins, and Lewis's (1968) pioneering study, it has been commonplace to set aside certain tokens in analyzing variability in the English copula as “don't count” (DC) forms. These cases are most often occurrences of the copula that exhibit categorical behavior (as with the full copula in clause-final position), as well as those that are ambiguous or indeterminate. In this article, I propose a set of copula forms that should be set aside from variable analysis as instances of DC forms to allow for systematic comparisons among studies. I review the major alternative descriptions of DC copula cases in the literature and analyze the behavior of the traditional DC categories. New data are presented to support the exclusion of particular DC cases from analyses of copula variability. Among the conclusions are that [was], [thas], and [is] should be excluded from quantitative analyses of variation in the copula because of their invariant status, and that a number of tokens commonly included (e.g., questions) should be excluded on various grounds.
AB - Ever since Labov, Cohen, Robbins, and Lewis's (1968) pioneering study, it has been commonplace to set aside certain tokens in analyzing variability in the English copula as “don't count” (DC) forms. These cases are most often occurrences of the copula that exhibit categorical behavior (as with the full copula in clause-final position), as well as those that are ambiguous or indeterminate. In this article, I propose a set of copula forms that should be set aside from variable analysis as instances of DC forms to allow for systematic comparisons among studies. I review the major alternative descriptions of DC copula cases in the literature and analyze the behavior of the traditional DC categories. New data are presented to support the exclusion of particular DC cases from analyses of copula variability. Among the conclusions are that [was], [thas], and [is] should be excluded from quantitative analyses of variation in the copula because of their invariant status, and that a number of tokens commonly included (e.g., questions) should be excluded on various grounds.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85008590415&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85008590415&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S0954394500001794
DO - 10.1017/S0954394500001794
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85008590415
VL - 9
SP - 57
EP - 79
JO - Language Variation and Change
JF - Language Variation and Change
SN - 0954-3945
IS - 1
ER -