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Syntactic Variation and Beyond

Article · January 2009

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-92299-4_9

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 Syntactic variation and beyond

Jenny Cheshire

1. Introduction

Syntactic variation sometimes patterns in similar ways to phonological variation, with

the frequencies of specific linguistic variants correlating with the large-scale social

variables typically investigated in sociolinguistic research, such as a speaker’s social

class or gender. It may also pattern with smaller-scale, local social factors, again like

phonological variation. Section 2 of this paper illustrates this second kind of

sociolinguistic variation. It describes how the frequency with which some working

class British adolescent boys use nonstandard morphological and syntactic features

relates to the boys’ participation in their local vernacular culture. We will also

consider the linguistic variation from a more dynamic perspective, looking at how

some of the boys use the socially symbolic meanings associated with the variable

forms to convey their attitudes towards their schoolteachers.

With syntactic variation, these kinds of sociolinguistic patterns and uses are

clearest in the case of variables where one variant is prescriptively defined as standard

and the other as nonstandard, like the nine features described in Section 2. In these

cases the standard and non-standard variants can be considered to have the same

linguistic function: we will see, for example, that both the presence and absence of

verbal –s marks present tense. There are other cases of syntactic variation, however,

where the social embedding of the variation is more indirect. Unlike phonological

variation, syntactic forms may have discourse functions that are equally well fulfilled

by a wide range of linguistic forms, drawn not only from morphology and syntax but

also from other components of language. In Section 4 I discuss an example of this

 2

kind. It concerns, initially, variation between the different clause structures used to

introduce a new entity into the discourse, a function usually considered to fall within

the field of information management. We will see that in order to discover large-scale

patterns of variation with social class and gender it was necessary to look beyond

syntactic variation and analyse the full range of linguistic phenomena that speakers

used to mark new discourse entities.

2. Variation and vernacular culture

In the late 1970s I carried out a study of morphological and syntactic variation in the

speech of adolescent friends, recorded by the method of long-term participant-

observation in adventure playgrounds in Reading, England. Some of these speakers

were subsequently recorded at school, by their teachers. The study is discussed in

detail in Cheshire (1982). Here I briefly describe one aspect of the speech of 13 boys

who took part in the research: the relationship between their use of nine non-standard

morphological and syntactic variants, and the extent to which the boys participated in

the local vernacular culture.1 The boys were aged between 11 and 16.

Some aspects of the boys’ behaviour fitted with the descriptions of

delinquent sub-cultures that were available at that time (by, for example, Willmott

1966). The boys used to meet at the adventure playgrounds at times when they were

supposed to be at school, and many of their activities centred around what Miller

(1958) referred to as the ‘cultural foci’ of trouble, excitement, toughness, fate,

autonomy and smartness (in the American English sense of ‘outsmarting’). I

identified six factors that appeared to be centrally important to the boys’ peer group

culture, in that they were frequent topics of conversation and were sources of prestige

within the friendship groups, and I used these factors to construct a ‘vernacular
 3

culture index’, in the same way that indices of socioeconomic class are commonly

constructed.

Four of these factors directly reflected the cultural foci of ‘trouble’ and

‘excitement’: three directly, one more indirectly. The three that directly related to

these foci were skill at fighting, carrying a weapon (such as a knife or a chain), and

participation in minor crime (such as shop lifting, arson or vandalism). Though

related, I treated these as separate indicators of adherence to the local vernacular

culture, firstly because not all the boys took part in all these activities, and secondly

because they did not all have the same degree of importance to the boys. For similar

reasons I treated as a separate indicator the nature of the job the boys hoped to take

when they left school. This was an important contributing factor to personal identity.

Jobs that were acceptable to the peer group reflected ‘trouble’ and ‘excitement’, even

if only indirectly. They included, for example, working as a slaughterer in an abattoir,

or as a lorry driver, motor mechanic or soldier. Unacceptable jobs were mainly

traditionally white-collar jobs involving working in a shop or an office. A fifth

indicator was ‘style’: the extent to which dress and hairstyle were important to the

boys. Many writers have stressed the importance of style as a symbolic value within

adolescent subcultures (see, for example, Hebdige 1988; and, more recently, Eckert

2001). Finally, a measure of the extent to which the boys swore was included in the

index, since this was an important symbol of ‘belonging’ for the boys (and the girls;

see Cheshire 1982). Swearing, of course, is a linguistic feature, but for these speakers

it involved only a few words that were not involved in the morphological or syntactic

variation analysed here.

The behaviour of each boy was scored separately for each of the six

indicators and displayed on a Guttman scale. The coefficient of reproducibility was

 4

0.97, confirming that the data were scalable. I then divided the boys into four groups

on the basis of their total score, with group 1 consisting of the boys who, according to

the vernacular culture index, conformed most closely to the norms of their vernacular

culture, while the boys in group 4 took virtually no part in the vernacular culture.

Groups 2 and 3 were intermediate in their adherence to the vernacular culture, with

group 2 conforming more closely than group 3.

I analysed the frequency with which each of the four groups of boys used the

nine non-standard morphological and syntactic features listed in (1) to (9) below, and

illustrated in (1a) to (9b). The examples all come from the playground recordings.

Each of the features has a corresponding standard English equivalent, as shown in the

invented examples (1b) to (9b). It is important to note that the standard and non-

standard forms have the same referential meaning and the same grammatical function:

for example, go and goes in (1) both refer to the same activity and both indicate first

person plural and present tense.

(1) verbal –s:

(1a) we goes shopping on Saturdays

(1b) we go shopping on Saturdays

(2) has

(2a) we has a little fire, keeps us warm

(2b) we have a little fire, keeps us warm

(3) past forms of BE

(3a) you was outside

 5

(3b) you were outside

(4) multiple negation

(4a) I’m not going nowhere

(4b) I’m not going anywhere

(5) never with preterite verb forms

(5a) I never done it, it was him

(5b) I didn’t do it, it was him

(6) relative what

(6a) there’s a know what you turn

(6b) there’s a knob which/that you turn

(7) auxiliary DO

(7a) how much do he want for it?

(7b) how much does he want for it?

(8) past tense of COME

(8a) I come down here yesterday

(8b) I came down here yesterday

(9) ain’t (with all persons, for past HAVE and past BE (auxiliary and copula)

(9a) I ain’t got any, I ain’t going, she ain’t a teacher

(9b) I haven’t got any, I’m not going, she isn’t a teacher
 6

Table 1 shows the frequency with which the groups used the non-standard

forms. In the Table the linguistic features are arranged into three classes, reflecting

the extent to which the features correlate with adherence to vernacular culture. Class

A contains four features whose frequency is very finely linked to the boys’ vernacular

culture index. The most sensitive indicator is non-standard verbal –s, which occurs

very frequently in the speech of the boys in group 1 (those who conform most

strongly to the vernacular culture norms) and progressively less frequently in the

speech of groups 2, 3, and 4. This linguistic feature, then, functions as a powerful

indicator of vernacular loyalty.

TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

The two linguistic features in class B also function as indicators of vernacular

loyalty, but they are less sensitive indicators than those in class A. There is significant

variation only between speakers in group 1 and group 4: in other words, between the

boys who conform most closely to the norms of the vernacular culture and those who

conform least closely. This type of sociolinguistic variation is not unusual: Policansky

(1980), for example, reports similar variation in the expression of subject-verb

concord in Belfast English, where there is significant variation only in the speech of

individuals at the extreme ends of a social network scale. When groups 2 and 3 are

merged, a regular pattern of variation with adherence to the vernacular culture

emerges for class B forms, as Table 2 shows. These features do function as indicators
 7

of vernacular loyalty, then, but they are less sensitive indicators than those in class A,

with patterns seen only for broad groupings of speakers.

TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE

Features in class C, on the other hand, do not correlate with the vernacular culture

index: for the most part, the figures form a completely irregular pattern. Interestingly,

each of these linguistic features is involved in other, more complex kinds of

sociolinguistic variation, and perhaps this explains why they do not function as

straightforward indicators of vernacular loyalty. Forms of auxiliary DO are

undergoing linguistic change away from an earlier dialect form towards the standard

English system, such that the present tense forms of auxiliary and main verb DO are

no longer distinct. Some forms of ain’t function as a direct marker of a vernacular

norm (Cheshire 1982). Nonstandard come functions as a marker of vernacular loyalty

for adolescent girls in these friendship groups, but for boys it is an invariant form:

none of the boys ever uses the standard variant came, irrespective of the extent to

which he conforms to the vernacular culture.

3. Variation and style

Only eight of the thirteen boys were recorded at school, since four boys had recently

left, and one was so unpopular with his teacher that she refused to spend extra time

with him. Jeff and Alec were recorded by their teacher during class discussions where

they each had a lot to say. The other school recordings were made by a teacher,

talking to two or three of the boys together. Again, full details of this part of the

research can be found in Cheshire (1982).

 8

Table 3 compares the frequency indices of the non-standard variants in the

playground recordings and the school recordings, analysing the tokens for all eight

speakers together. Those features that are sensitive indicators of vernacular loyalty

(class A) all occur less often in the boys’ school speech than in their playground

speech (although for was the difference in frequency is very low). Nonstandard never,

in class B, also occurs less often in the school recordings, although non-standard

what, another class B form, occurs slightly more often in the school recordings than in

the playground. The class C features, similarly, pattern irregularly: non-standard come

remains invariant while ain’t as HAVE and as copula BE increases in frequency in

the school recordings (nonstandard do did not occur in the school recordings, and

ain’t as an auxiliary occurred infrequently).

TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE

In Labov’s (1970) framework, the linguistic variables in class A could be

seen as markers, exhibiting both social and stylistic variation. Nonstandard never

might also be considered a marker, in these terms. Within the same framework,

nonstandard what could be considered an indicator, showing social but not stylistic

variation. This classification, however, relies on the group frequency figures.

Although there are many practical advantages to analysing groups of speakers rather

than individual speakers – especially in cases such as this where the school recordings

were sometimes short, yielding only small numbers of tokens – it is revealing to also

compare the linguistic behaviour of individuals. Consider, for example, Table 4,

which shows the frequency of use of verbal –s, a variable that occurred frequently in

both sets of recordings.

 9

TABLE 4 ABOUT HERE

Table 6 reveals some striking individual variation in the use of non-standard

verbal –s in the two speech styles. Nobby, a group 1 speaker, uses the non-standard

form only slightly less often at school than in the playground, whereas the other group

1 speakers (Tommy and Pete) use the form much less frequently when they are at

school. Jeff, a group 2 speaker, does not use the nonstandard variant at all in his

school recording, although the other group 2 speakers (Rob and Nicky) continue to

use the non-standard variant, albeit less frequently than in the playground recordings.

Alec, like Jeff, does not use the non-standard form at school; in contrast, Benny’s use

of the non-standard form increases at school, and by a quite substantial amount.

Some insight into these patterns of individual variation comes from

considering the situations in which the school recordings were made. Benny, Rob and

Nobby were recorded together, by their teacher. The teacher was asking about them

about what they liked to do outside school, and the boys were telling him about a

disco they were trying to organise. The teacher was making valiant efforts to

understand what the boys were telling him, but was clearly unfamiliar with the kind of

amplifying equipment and the general situation that the boys were discussing. It is

relevant that Benny and Nobby both hated school and in the playground recordings

they had made many derisory remarks about their teachers. Benny had just returned to

school after an absence of a whole term, and Nobby currently attended school only

intermittently. Rob, on the other hand, had a strict father and he did not dare to miss

school as often as his friends did.

 10

In the circumstances I have just outlined, speech accommodation theory

(Giles et al. 1991; Giles this volume) can help us understand the boys’ different

patterns of use of non-standard verbal –s. The teachers all use only standard English

variants. Rob knows the teacher, attends school fairly regularly and, we can assume,

accepts the constraints of the school situation. As a result his speech converges

towards the teacher’s, and he uses fewer non-standard variants than he does outside

school. Nobby, on the other hand, hates school and dislikes the teacher. As a result he

asserts his allegiance to the peer group culture rather than to the school, by refusing to

acknowledge the situational constraints and to accommodate to the teacher’s way of

speaking. The frequency with which he uses the non-standard form, therefore, does

not change (or rather, changes only slightly). Benny, who has only just returned to

school, asserts his independence and hostility to the school by using more non-

standard forms than he does usually. This is a very clear example of speech

divergence. As we saw in the previous section, Benny is not closely involved in the

peer group culture, and this is reflected in his playground speech by a relatively low

use of non-standard verbal -s forms. When he wants to assert his independence from

the school culture, however, he exploits the resources of the language system and

chooses to use the non-standard form more frequently than he does normally.

Speech accommodation theory can also account for the behaviour of the

other boys in this small study. Tommy, Pete and Ricky were recorded together, by a

teacher that they knew well, and liked. The teacher had taken them on camping and

fishing weekend expeditions, with other boys from their class. The conversation that

the teacher recorded began with some talk about one of these weekends and then

moved on to discuss racing cars and motorbikes, topics that interested both the

teacher and the boys. Speech accommodation theory predicts that in this situation the
 11

linguistic behaviour of the boys would converge towards that of the teacher (and vice-

versa, of course, but we do not have the information needed to comment on the

teacher’s changing speech patterns). This is precisely what happens – all three boys

use the non-standard form less often here than they do in the playground recordings.

The fact that they continue to use some non-standard forms, however, allows them to

still express their allegiance to the vernacular peer group culture.

Jeff and Alec behave differently from the other boys, as we saw, in using

only standard forms in their school recordings. This is especially surprising in the

case of Jeff, who as a group 2 member (like Rob and Nicky) conforms quite closely to

the norms of the vernacular culture. However, both recordings were made in a

classroom discussion with about 20 other students and their teacher, at different times

and by different teachers. Both Jeff and Alec participated a great deal in the

discussions, partly, perhaps, because their teachers had purposely chosen topics on

which they were known to have strong views (smoking and football hooliganism in

Jeff’s case, and truancy in Alec’s case), or because the teacher encouraged them to

take part because he knew their speech was being investigated. It is possible that the

overall formality of a public classroom discussion over-rode the option of displaying

linguistically the boys’ allegiance to the vernacular peer group culture. Alternatively,

the fact that no other members of the friendship group were present may have made

the boys more susceptible to the pressures of the school norms.

In any event, it is clear that a simple analysis of stylistic variation in terms of

the overall formality or informality of the situation cannot fully account for the

linguistic variation observed here. It is better to think in terms of situational

constraints on exploiting the resources of the linguistic system. Nonstandard verbal –s

is a strong indicator of loyalty to the vernacular culture, and in some cases this
 12

symbolic function over-rides other situational constraints on linguistic variation (as in

the speech of Nobby and Benny). In other cases (as with Jeff and Alec in a classroom

discussion) the situational constraints exclude the possibility of using the form in this

way. It is also clear that in order to understand how speakers exploit sociolinguistic

variation we need to look beyond group scores to consider how individual speakers

use the resources of their linguistic system to signal a range of different interactional

meanings.

4. Syntactic variation and beyond

So far I have discussed social variation between morphological and syntactic forms in

cases where it was straightforward to identify the function of the forms. Nonstandard

was and standard were, for example, both indicated past tense for the verb BE: no

other linguistic forms available to the adolescent speakers could express this

grammatical function. We will now consider a less straightforward example of

sociolinguistic variation involving syntactic forms. In this case the analysis began by

focussing on two variant syntactic forms used to introduce new information into the

discourse. We will see, however, that these were not the only forms that speakers used

for this function, and that the analysis had to expand to take account of the other

linguistic forms serving the same function.

The data come from a research project based on interviews with 14–15 year

olds in three English towns: Reading, Hull and Milton Keynes (Cheshire, Kerswill

and Williams 1999). In each town we recorded 32 adolescents aged 14–15, of whom

16 attended a school in a middle-class area and 16 attended a school in a more

working-class area (with ‘class’ defined broadly in each case, in terms of the
 13

residential area and parents’ occupation). In each school the fieldworker2 recorded 8

female and 8 male adolescents. Thus a total of 96 speakers took part in the project.

Full details of the analysis can be found in Cheshire (2005); here I give a

brief and necessarily simplified account. I was interested initially in the variation

between existential there constructions such as (10a), taken from one of the

interviews, and canonical subject-verb clauses, as in the invented (10b):

(10a) there’s a car in the village square . it’s parked near the bus shelter

(10b) a car’s in the village square . it’s parked near the bus shelter.

In the interviews the most frequent function of the existential there

constructions was to introduce a discourse-new item: in other words, a noun phrase

referring to an entity that had not been mentioned before and that could not be

inferred from something else that had been said. In (10a) and (10b), for example, a

car is a discourse-new item: neither the adolescent nor the fieldworker had mentioned

a car before. Discourse-new items contrast with both discourse-old items and

inferable items. It in (10a) and (10b) is a discourse-old item, referring to car, which

has just been mentioned. The bus shelter, on the other hand, is an inferable item: the

speaker presumably assumes that the fieldworker knows the village square (which is

near to the school where the recording was made) and that she can infer that bus

shelter refers to the shelter that is in the village square (this account of discourse-old

and discourse-new items is a simplified version of Prince’s 1981 framework). I

identified all the clauses where speakers introduced discourse-new items, with the

intention of distinguishing those that occurred in an existential there construction and

those that occurred in a canonical subject-verb construction. It soon became clear,

 14

however, that the adolescents used a very wide range of linguistic forms to mark the

noun phrases that introduced a discourse-new item, and that these should therefore be

included in the analysis alongside the existential there constructions and the canonical

clause constructions. The forms included other marked clause constructions, such as

left dislocation, possessive HAVE (GOT) constructions and it constructions, as in

(11)–(13).

(11) Hayley: and then who my uncle’s married to she comes from Somerset

(12) AW: so who do you live with then who’s in your family?

→ Sally: my mum and my dad and my three sisters and we’ve got my sister’s

friend staying with us since Christmas

(13) Jerry: it’s like too many people are going into business

These clause structures all allow speakers to position the discourse-new entities at the

end of the clause rather than the beginning, a strategy that helps interlocutors to

process the utterance (Prince 1981:228).

Another way of marking discourse-new items was to use a linguistic form

that explicitly creates interspeaker involvement. These forms included pragmatic

particles such as and stuff, sort of and like, as in (14). The particles are often

considered to signal an assumption of common ground between speaker and hearer,

and in this way they can signal that the hearer has to use this shared knowledge to

identify a new discourse referent. Other forms that functioned in this way included

high rising tones and indefinite this, as in (15).

 15

(14) Ann Williams has just asked Sam whether he has a job, to which he replied that

he has a Saturday job.

a. AW: where do you work?

→ b. Sam: it’s just in a like a fish place

c. AW: selling fish?

d. Sam yeah . World of Water [it’s like a

e. AW: [oh I see selling tropical fish =

f. Sam: = tropical fish

that’s the thing

(15) Linda: my mum and dad started having this conversation

A further strategy used by the adolescents was to utter a noun phrase and

then immediately expand it, perhaps because the speaker realised that they had not

given enough information for their interlocutor to successfully identify the referent

(Clarke and Wilkes-Gibbs 1986: 4). An example of this is given in (16), where RDC

is expanded to remedial dance clinic.

(16) Alison has been telling Ann Williams about her activities as a dancer, and

mentions that she gets a lot of injuries.

AW: doesn’t that worry you a bit?

Alison: well I’ve been going to RDC remedial dance clinic because I thought I

had an injury
 16

Non-restrictive relative clauses served a similar function, allowing speakers

to add extra information to the noun phrase as the discourse proceeds. Thus in (17)

who’s my nan’s sister expands my aunt Lucy.

(17) Carol: in my family I’ve got my mum my dad my nan and then my aunt Lucy

who’s my nan’s sister

I also needed to include in the analysis a range of features that are sometimes

considered to be dysfluencies. They included repetition, hesitation, false starts and

filled and unfilled pauses. Some researchers suggest that dysfluencies always show

that speakers are having difficulty producing their speech (see, for example, Arnold et

al. 2000: 47), but the difficulty can have many causes including accessing from the

mental lexicon a noun that has not been previously mentioned. The fact that the

speaker lingers over the production of the noun phrase can function as a clue to the

interlocutor, indicating that the speaker is about to produce new information

(Geluykens 1992). Repetition used before a discourse-new entity in this way is

illustrated in (18).

(18) Sally is talking about her brother.

Sally: he lives with his with his girlfriend

 17

Finally, there was a miscellaneous group of discourse-new items marked in

diverse ways that included explicit efforts at lexical retrieval, as in (19), and multiple

strategies, as in (20), where Andrew introduces the discourse-new entity Australian

teenage band using an existential there construction and like, with repetition of the

construction and a brief pause before the repeat.

(19) AW: and what do you want to be when you leave school?

Jeff: either a doctor or a computer s.s.scientist well you know make

computers programming erm computer programming that’s it

(20) Andrew: well there’s this . there is like an Australian teenage band at the

moment that play that kind of music

There were no consistent patterns of gender of social class variation in the

use of any of these different categories of discourse-new markers, nor in any of the

individual syntactic constructions, pragmatic particles or dysfluencies that were used

to mark discourse-new items. However, in all three towns there was a highly

significant gender and social class distribution in the use of ‘bare’ NPs. An example

of a ‘bare’ NP is instruction sheets in (21).

(21) Sam is talking about his stick insects.

Sam: they bred so fast we had to sell them with instruction sheets at the

summer fair
 18

As many as 410 discourse-new items (42.27%) were introduced in canonical

clauses in this way, without any explicit linguistic marking. Working-class female

adolescents used the highest proportion of bare NPs, and middle-class male

adolescents the lowest proportion. The effect of gender was particularly striking for

the middle class groups in all three towns, as Figure 1 shows. It was weaker, though

still significant, for the working class groups, as seen in Figure 2.

FIGURE 6.1 ABOUT HERE

FIGURE 6.2 ABOUT HERE

The gender distribution can be seen very clearly when the scores for

individual speakers are compared. Figure 3, for example, shows the percentage of

bare NPs used by the middle class adolescents in Reading. Although there was much

individual variation in the use of the different forms that could mark discourse entities

as new, with some speakers using, say, more pragmatic particles and others using

more syntactic constructions (and others using all of the forms mentioned above)

every female speaker used bare NPs at least once – mostly more than once – and most

used bare NPs more frequently than any of the discourse-new markers. In contrast,

only three of the middle class boys used bare NPs, and the frequency with which they

used them was uniformly low.

FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE

 19

The fact that the same gender and social class patterns occur in three separate

regions of England is compelling evidence of a previously unsuspected tendency for

male adolescent speakers, especially the middle class boys, to mark discourse-new

items in their talk.

Thus variation between existential clauses and canonical clauses did not of

itself have a role in distinguishing gender or social class groups. It did, however, form

part of a complex of strategies harnessed by speakers to accomplish a specific

discourse function (marking discourse-new entities). When the full complex of forms

was taken into account it became possible to see sociolinguistic patterning within the

data analysed here.

The next step, of course, is to consider the implications of this kind of social

variation and to try to explain why it may exist. It is possible that it relates to

historical and cultural factors that have given rise to different discourse styles for

working class and middle class groups, and for male and female speakers. There is a

large research literature suggesting that male speakers are more concerned with the

referential content of their talk and female speakers with the affective meaning (see,

for example, Holmes 1995), and this may account for the higher frequency with

which the boys in our study marked their discourse-new items. In other words, they

may have paid more attention than the female speakers to the information status of the

entities they introduced into their discourse. There is also a research literature on

social class differences that indicates that middle class speakers may have an

independent, speaker-oriented speech style, leading them to make their own opinions

and viewpoints explicit, whereas working-class speakers take a more collaborative,

addressee-oriented approach to talk, allowing their interlocutors more opportunities to

infer meanings and to draw their own conclusions (see, for example, Macaulay 2005).
 20

To some extent this may be the legacy of the more frequent participation of the

middle classes in formal public settings where it is necessary to construct explicit

meanings.

These interpretations are, of course, open to question: what is important is to

note that the social variation that was found in this analysis calls for a different kind

of interpretation than the variation discussed in Sections 2 and 3 of the paper.

5. Conclusion

Syntax is central to the construction of discourse. This means that when we are

analysing sociolinguistic aspects of syntactic variation we need to take account not

only of grammatical functions (such as tense marking) but also discourse functions

(such as the marking of new information) that may be fulfilled by lexical, phonetic

and other linguistic forms and strategies, as well as syntactic forms. With grammatical

functions it is often possible to analyse syntactic variation in terms of a simple

alternation of variants, as shown in Sections 2 and 3 of this paper. Even here,

however, it is worth considering what we may be overlooking by taking a variationist

approach to the analysis. In Section 2, for example, I considered ain’t as a simple

variant of different forms of BE not and HAVE not. It is possible, however, that ain’t

is a more emphatic form of negation than isn’t, say, or haven’t, in which case it would

be instructive to consider whether individuals who use ain’t frequently have a

different interactional style from speakers who use it more rarely. A similar point can

be made about the use of negative concord.

When the syntactic form in which we are interested serves a specific

discourse function, we may be forced to look beyond syntax to identify the full range

of forms that can be used for the same discourse function, as we saw in Section 4. If a
 21

broad analysis of this type then uncovers sociolinguistic variation this may suggest

that different social groups have different interactional styles, as we saw, again, in

Section 4. Thus the analysis of syntactic variation provides us with a range of

intriguing and complex perspectives on how speakers use language to create social

meanings and social life.

 22

Notes

1. Perhaps it is necessary to stress that the speech of the girls is not considered

here purely for reasons of space, not because it is less interesting or important.

2. The interviewers were Ann Williams and Paul Kerswill. ‘AW’ in the

illustrative extracts that follow stands for Ann Williams, who was the main

interviewer. Obviously the analysis could not have been done without the

work of Ann and Paul, and I would like to thank them for this, as well as for

their helpful comments on Cheshire (2005).

 23

References

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Heaviness versus newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse

status on discourse ordering. Language 76: 28–55.

Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams, Ann. 1999. The role of adolescents

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Table 1. Adherence to vernacular culture and frequency of nonstandard forms

Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4

Class A verbal -s 77.36 54.03 36.57 21.21

has 66.67 50.00 41.65 (33.33)

past forms of BE 90.32 89.74 83.33 75.00

multiple negation 100.00 85.71 83.33 71.43

Class B never with preterite verb forms 64.71 41.67 45.45 37.50

relative what 92.31 7.69 33.33 0.00

Class C auxiliary DO 58.33 37.50 83.33 -

past COME 100.00 100.00 100.00 (100.00)

ain’t = HAVE 78.26 64.52 80.00 (100.00)

ain’t = BE 58.82 72.22 80.00 (100.00)

ain’t = copula 100.00 76.19 56.52 75.00

Note: Bracketed figures indicate that the number of occurrences of the feature is low

and that the indices may not, therefore, be reliable. Following Labov (1970), less than

5 occurrences was considered too low for reliability.

 26

Table 2. Frequency indices for Group B forms in the speech of group 1, groups 2/3,
and group 4

Group 1 Groups 2 and 3 Group 4

never with preterite verb forms 64.71 43.00 37.50

Relative what 92.31 18.00 0.00

 27

Table 3. Stylistic variation in the frequency of nonstandard forms

playground school

Class A verbal -s 57.03 31.49

has 46.43 35.71

past forms of BE 91.67 88.57

multiple negation 90.70 66.67

Class B never with preterite verb forms 49.21 15.38

relative what 50.00 54.66

Class C Auxiliary DO - -

past COME 100.00 100.00

ain’t = HAVE 93.02 100.00

ain’t = copula 74.47 77.78

 28

Table 4. Nonstandard verbal –s in the playground and at school

playground school

Nobby 81.00 77.78

Tommy 70.83 34.62

Pete 71.43 54.55

Jeff 45.00 0.00

Rob 45.71 33.33

Nicky 57.14 31.75

Benny 31.58 54.17

Alec 38.46 0.00

 29

Reading chi square value 27.2833, df=1, p< 0.001

MK chi square value 16.1644, df=1, p < 0.001

Hull chi square value 31.1918, df=1, p< 0.001S

 30

Reading chi square value 34.9280, df = 1, p < 0.001

Milton Keynes chi square value 7.8232, df = 1, p < 0.01
Hull chi square value 11.0653, df = 1, p < 0.001
 31

Dotted bars represent percentage of bare NPs used by girls; striped bars
represent percentage of bare NPs used by boys.

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