copula deletion and BEV

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jan 25, 2007, at 6:16 AM, Dennis Preston wrote:

> Well, when do we delete copulas, and when do we simply employ
> ordinary phonological (reduction) processes? (And can we say for sure
> when were doing one or the other?)
>
> Seem like to me that "You takin' Delta" could have lots of sources:...

there is quite a considerable literature (going back over 30 years)
on what i have come to call Initially Reduced Questions (IRQs),
literature surveyed in an excellent annotated bibliography by Bruno
Estigarribia at stanford.  examples include:

   missing auxiliary: They gone already?
   missing subject: Don't want this?
   both missing: Ever tried these cookies?

(all of these from speakers who do *not* have "copula deletion" as in
AAVE.)

pretty much every kind of "deletion" imaginable has been proposed by
one person or another, and it's also been claimed that some subtypes
have one kind of deletion and others another kind.

Estigarribia suggests re-framing the question entirely, abandoning
the idea of "deletion".  instead, as in many other cases of
"deletion" (like "that"-deletion in relatives and complements), the
position we tend to take at stanford (mostly monostratal stanford) is
that the fuller and more reduced examples simply exemplify different
constructions, different form-meaning pairings; they are related by
sharing aspects of form and meaning, not by derivation of one from
the other.

surely IRQs arose *historically* from various sorts of reductions and
abbreviations, but they now, Estigarribia claims, stand on their own
(and there are several distinct constructions here).

all this is exciting, but now here's the bad news: Estigarribia
hasn't finished revising the bibliography and submitting it for
publication.  silly man, he's been absorbed in doing his dissertation
research, writing it up, and applying for jobs.  (the dissertation is
on the acquisition of yes-no questions in english, and IRQs play a
significant role in it.)  i'll see if there's some way for people
with an interest in the topic to get a copy of the most recent draft.

arnold, at the stanford syntax factory

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