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Language Log: Presentational/static locatives or "go" copulas in AAVE

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On the Variationist List, Benjamin Torbert (11/6) made the following request, and I gave (11/8) the reply below it, which I'd now like to  share with Language Log folks in the hope that someone may be able to add more. Torbert's query: I have [at least] two grad students who teach in majority (read, 100%) AfAm classrooms in StL, and they bring up things about AA(V)E, and they're seldom able to stump me, but this time, I wasn't able to give a complete answer.  They were asking me about what is apparently known as deictic go. 1) There go your pencil. 2) Here go your permission slip. These more or less paraphrase in mainstream American English (ugh, the label, I know) with a form of be, namely is, probably contracted most likely. Is there any scholarly work on this feature, beyond a basic description of the feature?  I was vaguely aware of it, but I don't remember anyone talking about it in six years of gradskool, when we were talking about AAE more or less nonstop.  The only thing I could find was a 1975 article (Clark/Garnica), and it seems to address different issues. In response to Torbert's request for info on "deictic go" in AAVE, as in "Here/go your pencil" (also known as "presentational go," the "go copula" or "static locatives"), here's what I know. There is no full-fledged study of this feature.  Most of what has been written and presented about it has been in the context of studies of African American child language, which is fine, but we also need studies of teenagers and adults, and we desperately need more detailed grammatical descriptions.  So if your students are interested, encourage them to go for it! Labov et al mentioned the feature briefly in their (1968) two volume Study of the Non-Standard English of Language of Negro and Puerto-Rican Speakers in NYC (always a good place to start for features of AAVE, although I wasn't able to find it in a quick look a few minutes ago), and Lisa Green has a couple examples and a short discussion (pp.  49-50) in her (2011) Language and the American Child.  She in turn cites these references: * Wyatt, Toya.  1995.  "Language development in African American child speech."  Linguistics and Education 7:7-22  [But I only found one reference to the go copula, p. 10, citing Lorraine Theresa Cole's 1980 Northwestern U PhD dissn, "Developmental analysis of social dialect features in the spontaneous language of preschool black children." Maybe Wyatt's 1991 U Mass Amherst dissn, "Linguistic constraints on copula production in black English child speech" has more? I don't have access to either of these dissertations.] * Horton-Ikard, RaMonda and Susan Weismer.  2005. "Distinguishing African American English from developmental errors in language production of toddlers."  Applied Psycholinguistics 26:597-620.  [Table 4, p. 608,  indicates that the go copula marks one of the most dramatic differences found between AAE and SAE speaking kids, with 19 tokens from the AAE 2.5 year olds, and 18 from the AAE 3.5 year olds, but none from the White 2.5 and 3.5 year olds.  But there is no grammatical analysis of the feature itself.] The most detailed discussion of this feature I've ever seen/heard was a presentation by Ida Stockman and the late Fay Vaughn-Cooke at a conference (NWAV?) in the 1980s.  I have the handout in my office, but not here.  They never published it, as far as I know. They did publish another interesting paper on "Lexical elaboration in children's locative action expressions" (Child Development 63.5 [1992]:1104-1125).  But that has nothing on static "here go" locatives or copulas. HOWEVER, Stockman (2010), in "A review of developmental and applied language research on African American Children:  From a deficit to a difference perspective on dialect features" (Language, Speech and Hearing Sciences in Schools 41:23-38) refers to this feature briefly on p. 28, citing Cole 1980 (as referenced above), and a 2007 poster on "Acquisition of 'go copula' in African American English" that she presented at NWAV in Philadelphia.   I'll write her to see if I can get a copy of that poster, and let this list know.  The Stockman/Vaughn-Cooke work is the best starting point on this feature, I think.

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