Heard on Springer: "my cousin nephew"; "your baby mama"; "Mary, the girl that I watch her kids", etc.

[Jocelyn Limpert]

in DC courts, you hear a lot of references to "baby fas" as well (baby
fathers as referred to in the black community, or at least that community
that involuntarily frequents the courtrooms)

On 11/25/08, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on Springer: "my cousin nephew"; "your baby mama";
>              "Mary, the girl that I watch her kids", etc.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Nov 19, 2008, at 9:22 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:
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> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      Heard on Springer: "my cousin nephew"; "your baby
> > mama"; "Mary,
> >              the girl that I watch her kids", etc.
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Used by two, early-twenties. white people who otherwise spoke an r-ful
> > Southern dialect of the "hillbilly" school (the theme of the show is
> > "Hot-Headed Hillbillies").
> >
> > This is probably not news among the pros in the field, but, for me,
> > this is the first time that I've heard these formations used in
> > natural speech, not once but several times, with no shifting to "my
> > cousin's nephew," etc., by whites who were clearly not whiggers.
> > Though Jerry hassled all of them about, e.g. "my cousin nephew"
> > ("'Cousin nephew'? What does that mean? Which is it supposed to be:
> > your cousin's nephew or your nephew's cousin?") they seemed to be
> > completely unaware of what he was driving at.
>
> if i understand these examples correctly, there are two very different
> phenomena here.
>
> one is the "zero possessive", as in "my cousin nephew" (standard "my
> cousin's nephew"), which we've discussed a number of times here
> (though somewhat inconclusively: it's a well-known feature of AAVE,
> but is variable for many speakers, and i don't know its geographical
> and social distribution, nor do i know any of the details of the
> internal factors favoring or impeding it).
>
> the first two examples have zero possessives, but of a somewhat
> complex sort: the possessor phrase itself contains a possessive (a
> possessive pronoun, in particular), as in [my cousin] [nephew].  this
> *might* be a favored environment for a zero possessive; speakers might
> think that possession is sufficiently marked by the possessive pronoun.
>
> (as i remarked in earlier discussions, the zero possessive is attested
> in british dialects.  the Survey of English Dialects says, "Mainly in
> the northern dialects, the possessive singular often takes a zero
> ending when one noun qualifies another ..." (p. 483-4).  SED gives
> examples, many with possessive pronouns in the possessor phrase, but
> some without: "farmer lad" 'farmer's lad'. in the U.S., i'm somewhat
> surprised (like Wilson, and, for that matter, Jerry Springer) to hear
> zero possessives from white speakers, even rural Southern ones.  but i
> don't know what the facts are.)
>
> now "Mary, the girl that I watch her kids" has a possessive pronoun in
> it, but otherwise is nothing like the zero possessives.  the point of
> interest is the relative clause "that I watch her kids" (modifying
> "the girl").  this is a well-known sort of "gapless relative", of a
> type that has a resumptive pronoun ("her") instead of a gap.  a gap
> would be just ungrammatical in the configuration here; the pronoun
> "rescues" an island violation.  some discussion at:
>
> ML, 10/14/07: Ask Language Log: Gapless relatives:
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005019.html
> gapped/gapless relatives
>
> AZ, 10/14/07: More gapless relatives:
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005022.html
> gapped/gapless relatives
>
> as far as i know, resumptive pronouns rescuing island violations are
> not particularly restricted socially or geographically, though they
> are most common in speech (where they allow speakers to get out of
> tight situations in mid-speech).  they also occur in comic writing,
> for humorous effect.
>
> (the standard version of "the girl that I watch her kids" would be
> "the girl whose kids I watch" -- with the front-heavy relative clause
> "whose kids I watch".  the thing is, this requires a lot of advance
> planning; avoiding this planning sets people up to need a resumptive
> pronoun.)
>
> arnold
>
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