Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1412

Part of Session 148: Child Language Variation (Other abstracts in this session)

When it’s Not an Option: Probing the Limits of Variation in Possessive Marking in Child African American English through Multi-method Research

Authors: Conner, Tracy
Submitted by: Conner, Tracy (University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States of America)

The majority of research investigating the patterns of African American English (AAE) has come from sociolinguistics. Researchers have sought to characterize possessive marking by adult speakers as optional given data from speech samples (Labov & Harris, 1986). Green (2011;196) has shown that even children acquiring AAE use some overt ’s marking, but most often use zero morphological marking (’ø) for prenominal possessives.

(1) a. and then Carl pour milk into baby’s cup

b. Carl poured chocolate milk into baby’ø cup

Other types of data are required to understand the distribution of possessive marking in AAE as prenominal possessive constructions do not provide insight into phrase-final contexts—possessives in which the object (cup above) is unspoken or elided (e.g. the baby’s). My analysis of speech sample data from 45 AAE-speaking children from the Dialect Sensitive Language Test (DSLT) (Seymour, Roeper & de Villiers, 2000) revealed that phrase-final possessives comprised only 12% of all possessive types, explaining why little focus has been placed on phrase-final contexts in previous analyses of possessive optionality in AAE. In this paper, I provide multi-source data from varied elicitation tasks, speech samples and story retells, and use syntactic analysis to illustrate that unlike the optionality of prenominal possessives reported in the literature, possessive marking in phrase final contexts is obligatory.

I analyzed data from elicitation tasks on the DSLT to provide evidence that possessive marking is not strictly optional. After being shown pictures of a dog, a cat, a horse, and bowls containing food for each animal, 568 AAE-speaking children ages 4-12 were asked to respond to the following prompt.

(2) Tell me whose food that is. (Pointing to the dog’s food.)

When participants produced prenominal possessives, these forms were ʼø-marked (i.e. the dog’ø food) 70% of the time. On the other hand, when phrase-final possessives were produced, only 45% were ʼø-marked (the dog’ø). This difference is a nod to a preference for overt marking in phrase-final contexts. We should expect an even greater difference in percentages if phrase-final possessive marking were obligatory, yet even Standard American English-speaking children taking the DSLT ʼø-marked phrase finally (%12). To rule out potential effects of the DSLT prompt—specifically, that Wh-elements like “whose” are being discussed as potential licensors of ʼø-marking in phrase-final responses—an experiment was designed to elicit phrase-final possessives from child and adult speakers using sentence completion tasks.

(3) Monkey, Diego, and Dora all brought lunch.

Monkey has salad, the salami belong to Diego. There’s a pizza.

That pizza must be _____.

a. Dora’s

b. Dora'ø

Only 14% of phrase-final responses occurred with ’ø-marking (3b), which is even greater confirmation than the DSLT experimental results that phrase-final possessive marking is obligatory. Syntactic analysis of these constructions suggest that ‘s is required phrase finally to licenses object ellipsis (Conner, forthcoming). Ultimately, my analyses show that with multi-method research—naturalistic, experimental, and theoretical—we can arrive more precise linguistic descriptions and generalizations by which to examine the acquisition of variable systems like AAE.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

When it’s Not an Option: Probing the Limits of Variation in Possessive Marking in Child African American English through Multi-method Research