"baby mama" vis-a-vis "baby's mama"

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 4/30/08 8:49:13 PM, thnidu at GMAIL.COM writes:


> On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky
> <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> > On Apr 30, 2008, at 7:56 AM, Marc Velasco wrote:
> >
> >  > So it seems semantically settled.
> >  >
> >  > But what about construction?
> >  >
> >  > Baby mama is derived from the possessive "baby's mama" no?
> >
> >  well, it corresponds to standard "baby's mama".  there's probably
> >  nothing to be gained by seeing  a possessor NP like "baby" in "baby
> >  mama" as synchronically derived from possessor NP+'s.  you could just
> >  as easily argue that the derivation goes in the opposite direction,
> >  with possessor NP+'s derived from bare possessor NP by the addition of
> >  a suffix.  what i think is the right way to compare the grammars is
> >  just to see them as having different ways for expressing a syntactic
> >  relationship -- in this case, the relationship between an NP
> >  determiner and the head N of the whole NP (= NP + N).
> 
> [and much more]
> 
> To make explicit a point that arnold seems to assume is already clear,
> "baby mama" comes from African-American Vernacular English / AAVE /
> Black English / BE. It is not standard American English. It is now
> fairly common in slang or colloquial general (i.e., white) American
> English, but usually with a clear allusion to its origins. This is the
> context of his references to sociolinguistics and language varieties.
> 
> --
> Mark Mandel
> 

It may be a small point, but it should be kept in mind that the absence of an 
overt possessive marker in AAVE is variable, not categorical (depending on 
the age, geographical location, and social positioning of the speaker). The 
assertion that "the right way to compare the grammars is just to see them as 
having different ways for expressing a syntactic relationship" is true only for 
those speakers of varieties of AAVE who have no possessive overt possessive 
marker [z] whatever. 


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