Syntactic change?

[Wilson Gray]

A headline from the local broadsheet:

a) "It's no ball figuring out what is a strike"

which can (or could) be opposed to:

b) "It's no ball figuring out what a strike is"

My memory is probably very faulty, but didn't
Labov once write that embedded questions of
type (a) were a peculiarity of BE or other non-
standard dialects, whereas those of type (b)
are standard?

-Wilson Gray

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