TY - JOUR
T1 - Rappin on the copula coffin
T2 - Theoretical and methodological issues in the analysis of copula variation in african-american vernacular english
AU - Rickford, John R.
AU - Ball, Arnetha
AU - Blake, Renee
AU - Jackson, Raina
AU - Martin, Nomi
PY - 1991/3
Y1 - 1991/3
N2 - We explore two unresolved methodological issues in the study of copula variation in African-American Vernacular English, assessing their quantitative and theoretical consequences via multiple variable rule analyses of data from East Palo Alto, California. The first is whether is contraction and deletion should be considered separately from that of are. We conclude that it should not, because the quantitative conditioning is almost identical for the two forms, and a combined analysis offers analytical advantages. The second issue is whether the alternative methods that previous researchers have used to compute the incidence of “contraction” or “deletion” (“Labov Contraction and Deletion,” “Straight Contraction and Deletion,” “Romaine Contraction”) fundamentally affect the results. We conclude that they do, especially for contraction. We also discuss implications of our analysis for two related issues: the ordering of contraction and deletion in the grammar, and the presence of age-grading or change in progress in East Palo Alto.
AB - We explore two unresolved methodological issues in the study of copula variation in African-American Vernacular English, assessing their quantitative and theoretical consequences via multiple variable rule analyses of data from East Palo Alto, California. The first is whether is contraction and deletion should be considered separately from that of are. We conclude that it should not, because the quantitative conditioning is almost identical for the two forms, and a combined analysis offers analytical advantages. The second issue is whether the alternative methods that previous researchers have used to compute the incidence of “contraction” or “deletion” (“Labov Contraction and Deletion,” “Straight Contraction and Deletion,” “Romaine Contraction”) fundamentally affect the results. We conclude that they do, especially for contraction. We also discuss implications of our analysis for two related issues: the ordering of contraction and deletion in the grammar, and the presence of age-grading or change in progress in East Palo Alto.
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U2 - 10.1017/S0954394500000466
DO - 10.1017/S0954394500000466
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84974022131
VL - 3
SP - 103
EP - 132
JO - Language Variation and Change
JF - Language Variation and Change
SN - 0954-3945
IS - 1
ER -