Relativizer omission in Anglophone Caribbean Creoles, Appalachian, and African American ...

27 Pages·2011·1.1 MB·English

CSLI Lecture Notes Number 201
LANGUAGE FROM A
COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE
Grammar, Usage, and Processing
Studies in Honor of Thomas Wasow
edited by
Emily M. Bender & Jennifer E. Arnold
CSLI Publications
Stanford
Copyright (cid:13)c 2011
CSLI Publications
Center for the Study of Language and Information
Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States
15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Language from a cognitive perspective : grammar, usage, and
processing / edited by Emily M. Bender and Jennifer E. Arnold.
p. cm. – (CSLI lecture notes number 201)
“Thisbookisacollectionofpapersonlanguageprocessing,usage,and
grammar,writteninhonorofThomasWasowtocommemoratehiscareer
ontheoccasionofhis65thbirthday.”
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-57586-611-6 (alk. paper) –
ISBN 978-1-57586-610-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Cognitive grammar. 2. Grammar, Comparative and
general–Syntax. I. Bender, Emily M., 1973- II. Arnold, Jennifer E.
III. Wasow, Thomas.
P165.L38 2011
415—dc22
2011002689
CIP
∞ The acid-free paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIZ39.48-1984.
CSLIwasfoundedin1983byresearchersfromStanfordUniversity,SRI
International,andXeroxPARCtofurthertheresearchanddevelopmentof
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andCSLIPublicationsarelocatedonthecampusofStanfordUniversity.
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andcorrectionsbytheauthorandpublisher.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Jennifer E. Arnold & Emily M. Bender
2 Grammar Engineering and Linguistic Hypothesis
Testing: Computational Support for Complexity in
Syntactic Analysis 5
Emily M. Bender, Dan Flickinger & Stephan Oepen
3 Accuracy vs. Robustness in Grammar
Engineering 31
Dan Flickinger
4 Local Grammaticality in Syntactic Production 51
Ash Asudeh
5 Blocking and the Architecture of Grammar 81
Peter Sells
6 Simplicity and Fit in Grammatical Theory 99
Amy Perfors
7 “Basic Information Structure” and “Academic
Language”: An Approach to Discourse Analysis 121
James Paul Gee
8 Relativizer Omission in Anglophone Caribbean
Creoles, Appalachian, and African American
v
vi / Language from a Cognitive Perspective
Vernacular English [AAVE], and Its Theoretical
Implications 139
John R. Rickford
9 Corpus-based Research on Language Production:
Information Density and Reducible Subject
Relatives 161
T. Florian Jaeger
10 Ordering Choices in Production: For the Speaker
or for the Listener? 199
Jennifer E. Arnold
11 Weight and Word Order in Historical English 223
Harry J. Tily
12 Investigating Syntactic Persistence in Corpora 247
Neal Snider
13 Discontinuous Dependencies in Corpus Selections:
Particle Verbs and Their Relevance for Current
Issues in Language Processing 269
John A. Hawkins
14 Information in Virtual Spaces 291
Susanne Riehemann
8
C
oRelativizer Omission in Anglophone
p
Caribbean Creoles, Appalachian,
y
r
i
and African American Vernacular
g
Englihsh [AAVE], and Its
t

Theoretical Implications
2
0
John R. Rickford
1
1

C
Preface
S
It is a pleasure, first of all, to contribute this paper to a volume honor-
ing my friend and colleague Tom WasLow. Tom and I have been faculty
I
colleagues in the Linguistics Department at Stanford since 1980, and
neighbors in Barron Park, Palo Alto (our fences touch at one corner)
P
since 1982. More than that, I have collaborated with him on several
u
different morphosyntactic variables, resulting in four publications so
b
far(Rickford,Wasow,Mendoza-Denton,&Espinoza,l1995;Sells,Rick-
i
ford, & Wasow, 1996; Rickford, Wasow, Zwicky, & Buchstaller, 2007;
c
Buchstaller, Rickford, Traugott, Wasow, & Zwicky, to appear), and in
a
every case I have found his contributions to be richly illuminatting. In-
i
deed, Tom and I practice what some might call socio-syntax, and at
thesummermeetingoftheLinguisticSocietyofAmericaatOhiooState
University in 2008, we presented a paper on the value of this kindnof
collaboration across Linguistics subfields.1 s
1“Collaborations: As far as different subfields, we’re all, “Aint no reason we
∅
shouldn’tworktogether.”Invitedplenarytalk,July2008.
LanguagefromaCognitivePerspective.
EmilyM.BenderandJenniferArnold,Editors
Copyright(cid:13)c 2011,CSLIPublications.
139
140 / John R. Rickford
Tom has also been an invaluable consultant on my three-year
National Science Foundation project on Grammatical Variation and
Change, and it is out of this research that the present paper grows. I
am delighted that one of its first published results should appear in a
volume dedicated to him.
1 Introduction
C
The primary focus of this paper is the empirical question of how (how
ooften, and with what linguistic conditioning) creole and vernacular
pEnglishspeakersinGuyana,Jamaica,AppalachiaandAfricanAmerica
oymitthat,who,what (i.e.havezeroinsteadofanovertrelativepronoun
r
or reliativizer) in relative clauses like:
(1) gI saw the boy that/who(m)/what/Ø you like.
h
From quatntitative studies of the past twenty years (e.g. Kikai,

Schleppegrell, & Tagliamonte, 1987; Adamson, 1992; Guy & Bayley,
1995; Tottie &2Rey, 1997; Wasow, Jaeger, & Orr, 2004; Tagliamonte,
Smith, & Lawrenc0e, 2005), we know a lot about this in British and
American varieties, bu1t nothing about this in Caribbean Creole En-
glish, Appalachian or m1odern African American Vernacular English

[AAVE].
In attempting to answer tChis first question, I’ll consider a second:
Can the patterns of relativizer omission in these vernacular/creole va-
S
rieties contribute any new insights to the old debate about the creole
L
vs English origins of AAVE? If ‘Black’ AAVE patterns like Caribbean
I
CreoleEnglishes(speakersofwhichwerew ell-representedinthefound-
ingpopulationsofBlackEnglishspeakersinPtheAmericancolonies;see
Rickford, 1997), while ‘White’ Appalachian behaves more like English
u
in Ulster and other ‘Northern’ British areas from which the ancestors
b
of today’s Appalachians came (see Montgomery, 2001l), we might con-
i
clude that the creolists are right and that this case confirms Labov’s
c
more general claim (1980:xvii) that “quantitative patterns can ap-
a
parently preserve linguistic history over several centuries andtseveral
i
continents.”
o
Athird,relatedquestionarisesaswell:Arethevariablepatternsfor
relativizeromissionspecificenoughtoparticulardialectsorregionsthnat
they can be used reliably to reconstruct historical relations from cross-s
variety comparisons, or do they reflect broad processing constraints
that might be found in all Englishes, if not universally (Wasow et al.,
2004; Jaeger & Wasow, 2007)?
To answer these questions, I’ll look at data on relativizer omission
in Guyanese and Jamaican Creole English, Appalachian English, and
Relativizer Omission and Its Theoretical Implications / 141
AAVE, but I should note that the research reported on in this pa-
per is part of a larger project including Barbadian English, and two
other variables, plural marking and question formation. The goals of
theprojectaretoincreaseunderstandingofquantitativelinguisticvari-
ationinthesevarieties,providebetterdatafortheAAVEcreoleorigins
debate, and contribute to the question of whether variable constraint
patterns can be reliably used for dialect-specific historical reconstruc-
Ction, as previously assumed (e.g. Poplack, 2000).2
oOne question that some readers may already have is how relativizer
pomissionisrelevanttothedebateoverthecreoleoriginsofAAVE.The
aynswer is that relativizer omission has, over the past decade (Tottie &
Reyr,i1997; Tottie & Harvie, 2000), been added to the evidence of cop-
ula absence and other variables in the debate over the creole origins of
g
AAVE. In particular, Tottie and Harvie (2000), considering relativizer
h
omission datta from “Early African American English” [EAAE] includ-

ing recordings of US ex-slaves, and descendants of African Americans
who went to No2va Scotia (Canada), and Saman´a (Dominican Repub-
lic) in the early 190th century, conclude (p. 225) that these varieties
descend from English1rather than creole stock, since they seem to have
constraints similar to tho1se of English dialects.

But although Tottie and Harvie (2000) was a welcome, pioneering
study, it was limited in threeCmajor respects:
a. TheabsenceofquantitativeSstudiesofrelativizeromissioninAn-
glophone (or any other) creoles to which the “Early” AAE findings
L
could be compared. This absence wasInot their fault, but without

quantitative creole data on this variable, one could not reliably con-
cludethatrelativizeromissioninEAAEpPatternedmorelikeEnglish
than Creole. u
b. The corpora that Tottie and Harvie used for EbAAE (e.g. the Ex-
l
Slave Recordings) yielded very few tokens of resitrictive relative
clauses. Again, this was not the authors’ fault, butcthe resulting
quantitative distributions were weak, with only five ofatheir eigh-
t
teen tables achieving statistical significance. (See Rickford, 2i006 for
further discussion.) o
c. As a result of (b), the authors did not have enough tokens for
n
Variable Rule (Varbrul) multivariate analysis, which simultane-
s
ously controls for the effect of different factors, long considered the
gold standard in variationist studies.
2Thethreevariableschosenforthislargerproject(fundedbyNSFgrant#BCS-
0545424) were among the nine examined by contributors to Poplack, 2000. See
Rickford,2006forareviewarticleonthisbook.
142 / John R. Rickford
Hence the need for this study.
2 Relativizers: Some Preliminaries
English restrictive relative clauses [enclosed in square brackets below],
“restrict the denotation” (Huddleston, Pullum, & Bauer, 2002) of an
antecedent NP (underlined below), and may be introduced in one of
t.hree ways:
C
By a [+/- human] wh pronoun (who(m), which), as in:
o
(1a) I saw the boy [who(m) you like]
p
. (1b) I saw the ball [which you like]
y
Bry that, in:
. (1ci) I saw the boy/ball [that you like]
g
By zero, as in:
(1d) Ihsaw the boy/ball [Ø you like]
t

Excluded from this variation are non-restrictive relative clauses,
where the antec2edent is already uniquely denoted. These often have
“comma pronuncia0tion” and can be introduced only by wh pronouns:
1
(2) I saw Mary, who(m)/*that/*Ø you like.
1

Following Schachter (1985) and many recent works on this variable,
we’ll refer to who/which, thaCt, Ø as relativizers and include in this
categorytootheCreoleandEnglishdialectvariantwhat wa wi,which
S ∼ ∼
occurs with both human and non-human antecedents.
L
At least since the 1960s (Bailey, 19I66, 110ff) and 1970s (Quirk

& Greenbaum, 1973, 380ff), descriptive and generative linguists have
noted the variation between these relativizePrs and made informal ob-
servations about the factors that seem to favour the zero variant. An
earlygeneralizationisthatStandardorMainstreamEnglishallowsrel-
b
l
ativizeromission(thezerovariant)withOBJECTrelatiives(theobject
of the verb in the relative clause) as in (1) above, but ncot with SUB-
JECT relatives (the subject of the verb in the relative clause), as in
a
(3): t
i
(3) I saw the boy [who/*Ø likes you] o
n
But a number of English dialects (e.g. AAVE, some Scottish, Irish
s
and English varieties) do allow omission of subject relativizers, as in
(4):
(4) “...there were a boy in Ballyclare [Ø told me this]”
(Tagliamonte et al., 2005, p. 76)
Relativizer Omission and Its Theoretical Implications / 143
However,eveninthesevernacularvarieties,subjectrelativizeromis-
sion is less common than object relativizer omission, and its constraint
patterns (what favors or disfavors omission) are somewhat different.
Quantitative studies of relativizer variation and omission in English
(revealingconstraintsthatnon-quantitativestudiesoftenmissed)have
been available since the 1980s (Romaine, 1982; Kikai et al., 1987). But
they’vebecomemorecommonsincethe1990s,andinrecentyears,have
Cattracted generativists as well as sociolinguists, scholars interested in
opurely syntactic and/or processing constraints on this variation (e.g.
pLehmann, 2001; Wasow et al., 2004; Wiechmann, 2008).
y
3 rData and Methodology
i
The Gguyanese data to be considered in this paper come primarily
frominformalspokeninterviewsmadebymyself(anativespeaker)with
h
cane-cutters,tweeding-gang women, shop-owners and others from Cane

WalkandelsewhereinDemeraraandBerbicebetween1975and1982,3
2
supplemented by two recordings made for Don Winford by University
of Guyana student0s in Mahaicony in 1991.4
The Jamaican da1ta come from two sources: (a) Informal spoken
recordings, made betwee1n 1991 and 2006. Some of these are socio-

linguistic interviews (most conducted by native speakers, although a
few were conducted by myselfC); others include arguments in public or
on the air recorded by Kathryn Shields-Brodber of the University of
S
West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, and her students.5 (b) Extracts from Li-
L
onheart Gal (Sisteren with Ford-Smith 2I005), a collection of oral nar-

ratives from Jamaican women first linguistically analyzed by Patrick,
P
3CaneWalkisapseudonymforaruralvillageontheEastCoast,Demerara,less
thanhalfanhouroutsidethecapitalcityofGeorgetownu.
4I am grateful to Don Winford for sharing these materibals with us, and to the
followingfacultymembersandstudentsfromtheUniversityoflGuyanawhohelped
i
withthetranscriptionandcodingoftheCaneWalkandotherGuyaneserecordings:
c
AndreaAlly,KencilBanwarie,AlimHosein,S.Hussein,andDaizalSamad,among
others.MackenziePrice,graduatestudentatUCDavis,alsohelpedwiaththecoding
andvariableruleanalysisoftheGuyanesedata. t
i
5IamgratefultoKathrynShields-Brodberformakingtheserecordingsavailable
to us. The following students and faculty members (most from the Univerosity of
theWestIndies,Mona),alsohelpedtorecord,digitize,transcribeorcodesampnles
of Jamaican speech: Lisa Monique Barker, Annife Campbell, Dahlia Thompson,
s
Tasheney Francis, Audene Henry, Trecel Messam, Velma Pollard, Angela E. Rick-
ford,JodianA.Scott,AndreSherriah,KadianWaltersandKedishaWilliams.
144 / John R. Rickford
Carranza, and Kendall (1993).6 The relativizer omission patterns in
these two subsets were similar.7
The Appalachian data come from two sources: (a) West Virginia
recordings made in the 1970s by Walt Wolfram, Donna Christian and
their associates; (b) recordings with older speakers in Beech Bottom,
North Carolina, made by Christine Mallinson, Becky Childs, Daniel
Schreier and others in 2001. We are grateful to these researchers and
Cto Clare Dannenberg and Tyler Kendall for making these materials in
othe North Carolina Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis (NCSLAAP)
pproject available to us.8
yThe AAVE data are primarily from informal sociolinguistic inter-
viewrsiwith working-class speakers in East Palo Alto, California, con-
ductedbycommunityinsiderslikeFayeMcNair-Knoxandherdaughter
g
Rashida Knox (but some also by my students at Stanford and myself)
h
between 198t6 and 2008.9

Every occurrence of a restrictive relative clause we could find in
thesedatasetsw2asextracted,10 andcodedforrelativizervariant(that,
who/which, what/w0a/wi, Ø), relativizer type (subject/non-subject),
and the following add1itional constraints, most of which sociolinguists
and syntacticians have fo1und relevant to this variable:

6Thefollowingparticipantsinthe“LanguageVariation”courseItaughtatthe
2008 Caribbean Linguistics and LaCnguage Institute (held at the University of the
WestIndies,Mona,Jamaica)helpedtoextractandcoderelativizersfromthenar-
S
ratives in Lionheart Gal: Kencil Banwarie, Gregory Carter, Lars Hinrichs, Nicole
Hohn, Sonia Marville-Carter, Anderlene MoLhan-Ragbir, Andrea Moll, Marguerite
I
Murray, Ferne Regis, Daidrah Smith, Jessica Spencer and Adrienne Washington.

LauraSmithalsoplayedacriticalroleinthecodingandanalysisoftheJamaican
data. P
7Thisisreassuring,sincethetwoJamaicandatasetsaremoredifferentingenre
u
thantheothercaseswhereIcombineddatasets(e.g.Appalachia,whereIcombined
thetranscriptsfromtwodifferentsociolinguisticprojects).TbheLionheartGal texts
l
differ from the usual transcripts of sociolinguistic interviews inisofar as they are
published records of “testimonies” collected and edited by Honor Ford-Smith, a
c
member of the Sisteren collective whose story also appears in the volume. Ms.
Ford-Smith has told me that the published texts are essentially faiathful to what
t
wasoriginallysaid,butwedon’thaveaccesstotheoriginalrecords. i
8I am grateful to Michael Montgomery for sharing with me his transcripts of
o
someoftheWestVirginiarecordings,andtoPatrickCallier,PaulineCristy,Rebecca
Greene,ColePaulson,andDougKenterforhelpingtotranscribeandcodesomenof
theAppalachianrecordings. s
9In transcribing and coding the AAVE data, I was ably assisted by Rachel
Cristy, Catherine Howard, Lauren Hall-Lew, Monique King, Mackenzie Price and
LisaYoung,amongothers.
10Excluded were adverbial relatives (when, where), incomplete relative clauses,
and other tokens excluded by Tottie and Harvie (2000) and Tagliamonte et al.
(2005).