Children's relative clause markers in two non-mainstream dialects of English

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-1-2011

Abstract

We examined children's productions of mainstream and non-mainstream relative clause markers (e.g. that, who, which, what, where, Ø) in African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) as a function of three linguistic variables (syntactic role of the marker, humanness of the antecedent and adjacency of the noun phrase head). The data were language samples from 99 typically developing 46-year-olds: 61 spoke AAE and 38 spoke SWE. The majority of the children's relative clauses included mainstream markers. Non-mainstream markers were rare, with 36% involving Ø subjects and 2% involving what. The children produced who exclusively as subjects and with human antecedents, where exclusively as locatives and with non-human antecedents and Ø and what primarily as direct objects or objects of prepositions and with non-human antecedents. Although AAE- and SWE-speaking children produce some non-mainstream relative markers, the majority of their markers are mainstream. Their use of relative markers is also influenced by linguistic variables in ways that are consistent with a wide range of mainstream and non-mainstream English dialects. These findings show across-dialect similarity in children's relative clauses, even though characterisation of relative clauses as a contrastive dialect structure remains justified. © 2011 Informa UK, Ltd.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics

First Page

725

Last Page

740

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