TE 407: Emily Mullins

SGI: Linguistic Variance

"Linguistic Variation in Spike Lee's School Daze" (1987) by Margaret

Thomas

Focus: That powerful social and psychological forces drive speakers both
toward and away from a standard language, resulting in a complex and
dynamic interplay of standard and non-standard usage both for individual
speakers and within speech communities

The narrative concerns social and political tensions between two groups, "the
Haves" and "the Have-Nots." The "Haves" are light skinned and upper class;
the "Have-Nots" are darker-skinned and some of them are the first in their
families to attend college.

The particular scene we will look at has a number of properties that make it a
rich source of data about language variation. Please look out for:

Examples of speech used in different social contexts

Language of intimates (Dap and friends talking together in the car)
Conventionalized service language (The students interacting with the
waitress)
Language between strangers (the locals in confrontation with the students)
Examples of speech display in a range of affects
Playful joking on the way to KFC
Language communicating veiled resentment from the waitress
Language charged with explicit hostility in the clash with the locals
Students' sobered conversation on their way back to the campus
Examples of different speech acts
Language is used… to tease, inform, request, reject, challenge, conciliate,
insult, deny, attach, support, threaten, reflect, agree, and disagree

Questions to Consider:
Can you distinguish instances where speakers shift speech styles between
AAV and Standard English (code-switching)?
Where, why, and by whom does code-switching take place?
Ex: Look closely at how Monroe speaks in the car, and the conversation
between Jordan and a local in regards to the saltshaker; How does he start
the conversation? How does he respond?
How do the locals speak in comparison to the "Have-Nots"?
Why might a speaker employ one style rather than another?

Some Helpful Features of Standard Dialect AAV:

Consonants /t,d,s,z/ occurring at the end of words are often deleted or
weakened
Test becomes what can be represented orthographically as tes'; cold as col';
seat, seed, and see can become homonyms
But because linguistic behavior is so complex, not all such consonants are
equally subject to deletion. For example, an omission of final consonants is
less likely in AAV when they carry grammatical significance, as in looked and
closed where /t/ and /d/ signal past tense.
In AAV, Standard English diphthongs (vowels which exhibit a noticeable
change in quality within a single syllable, like the /aI/ in nice or the /au/ in
house) often become long "pure" vowels ("monophthongs").
Nice may be pronounced as /naIs/ and house as /haIs/
Speakers of AAV often substitute the voiced alveolar stop /d/ for the voiced
interdental fricative /ð/ so that there sounds like dare
Speakers of AAV may delete the liquids /r/ and /l/ after vowels ("in post-
vocalic position"), as in /wiI/ (will) and /maid/ (mired).
Negative concord ("Double negative") is often used
Negative inversion is utilized; a rule which moves a negative modal into
sentence-initial position around an indefinite subject in declarative
utterances, as in Can't nobody tag you then
Invariant be indicating habitual or durative aspect, as in … cause the office
be closed on weekends
Null be signaling stativity, as in She pretty
AAV distinguishes between the habitual aspect of She be busy and the
stativity of She busy (here indicating a temporary state) where standard
English has only the ambiguous She's busy
Loss of Standard English genitive case-marking as in They daddy in the house
or There go Willie mother right there
Frequent absence of nominal plural -s (Two boy just left) and of third-person
singular verbal -s in simple present tense (My father, he work at Ford)
Use of the negative copula, ain't