To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English

This paper has two objectives; firstly, to contribute to research on the variation between full and contracted forms of inflected copula/auxiliary be in conversations among native speakers of English and secondly to test whether generalities and inferences made in the late 1960s to 1980s by Labov, t...

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Main Author:	Hafriza Burhanudeen
Format:	Article
Language:	English
Published:	Penerbit UKM 2004
Online Access:	http://journalarticle.ukm.my/737/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/737/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/737/1/GemaVol4.2.2004No1.pdf

id	ukm-737
recordtype	eprints
spelling	ukm-7372016-12-14T06:28:02Z http://journalarticle.ukm.my/737/ To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English Hafriza Burhanudeen, This paper has two objectives; firstly, to contribute to research on the variation between full and contracted forms of inflected copula/auxiliary be in conversations among native speakers of English and secondly to test whether generalities and inferences made in the late 1960s to 1980s by Labov, the ‘father’ of secular linguistics in this area, and then Rickford and Wolfram can still hold its own in relation to some data collected by the writers in the 1990s. Work in this area of sociolinguistics was initiated by Labov (1969), who analyzed copula/auxiliary contraction and deletion in Vernacular Black English (VBE). Labov found that is and are deletion are possible in VBE only in environments where contraction is possible in SE. He also showed that contraction and deletion in white speech (that is, SE) favor the same grammatical categories in the following complement.Following Labov’s work, a number of other studies have compared deletion and contraction in VBE with white non-standard (WNS) contraction (Labov et al. 1968; Wolfram 1969; Fasold 1972; Wolfram 1974; Rickford 1988. Few studies to date have specifically compared VBE with SE, hence the use of classic references in this paper. An exception is the paper by Fasold and Nakano presented in 1989. The copula/auxiliary is an important feature in such a comparison because of its use as evidence in the divergence hypothesis, which asserts that VBE is a decreolized creole currently developing separately from white SE (Rickford 1988:2). The findings for this paper include the suggestion that the phonetic environments examined appeared to have little or no effect on copula/auxiliary contraction, and the same was true of following constituent environments. Preceding constituent environments, by contrast, clearly had an influence on copula/auxiliary contraction. The findings indicate that the inferences made by pioneers in the field can still claim their own in relation to research done in the 1990s. Penerbit UKM 2004 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en http://journalarticle.ukm.my/737/1/GemaVol4.2.2004No1.pdf Hafriza Burhanudeen, (2004) To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English. GEMA: Online Journal of Language Studies, 4 (2). pp. 1-20. ISSN 1675-8021 http://www.ukm.my/ppbl/Gema/gemahome.html
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Local University
institution	Universiti Kebangasaan Malaysia
building	UKM Institutional Repository
collection	Online Access
language	English
description	This paper has two objectives; firstly, to contribute to research on the variation between full and contracted forms of inflected copula/auxiliary be in conversations among native speakers of English and secondly to test whether generalities and inferences made in the late 1960s to 1980s by Labov, the ‘father’ of secular linguistics in this area, and then Rickford and Wolfram can still hold its own in relation to some data collected by the writers in the 1990s. Work in this area of sociolinguistics was initiated by Labov (1969), who analyzed copula/auxiliary contraction and deletion in Vernacular Black English (VBE). Labov found that is and are deletion are possible in VBE only in environments where contraction is possible in SE. He also showed that contraction and deletion in white speech (that is, SE) favor the same grammatical categories in the following complement.Following Labov’s work, a number of other studies have compared deletion and contraction in VBE with white non-standard (WNS) contraction (Labov et al. 1968; Wolfram 1969; Fasold 1972; Wolfram 1974; Rickford 1988. Few studies to date have specifically compared VBE with SE, hence the use of classic references in this paper. An exception is the paper by Fasold and Nakano presented in 1989. The copula/auxiliary is an important feature in such a comparison because of its use as evidence in the divergence hypothesis, which asserts that VBE is a decreolized creole currently developing separately from white SE (Rickford 1988:2). The findings for this paper include the suggestion that the phonetic environments examined appeared to have little or no effect on copula/auxiliary contraction, and the same was true of following constituent environments. Preceding constituent environments, by contrast, clearly had an influence on copula/auxiliary contraction. The findings indicate that the inferences made by pioneers in the field can still claim their own in relation to research done in the 1990s.
format	Article
author	Hafriza Burhanudeen,
spellingShingle	Hafriza Burhanudeen, To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English
author_facet	Hafriza Burhanudeen,
author_sort	Hafriza Burhanudeen,
title	To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English
title_short	To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English
title_full	To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English
title_fullStr	To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English
title_full_unstemmed	To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English
title_sort	to be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard english and non-standard varieties of english
publisher	Penerbit UKM
publishDate	2004
url	http://journalarticle.ukm.my/737/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/737/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/737/1/GemaVol4.2.2004No1.pdf
first_indexed	2023-09-18T19:31:37Z
last_indexed	2023-09-18T19:31:37Z
_version_	1777404999251263488

To be or not to be: an insight into the relationship between standard English and non-standard varieties of English

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