AUX+NEG-Fronting

[Wilson Gray]

For a very long time, I was under tthe impression that sentences like:

"She's so mean and evil that _can't anybody stay with her_,"

once spoken by my mother, was standard English. When  I was in my
mid-thirties, Haj Ross happened to mention, in the course of a "Baby
Syntax" (= "Synntax 101" in M.I.T. Linguistics-Dept. jargon) lecture,
that this kind of thing was peculiar to Black English. This made me
wonder whether it was also a feature of General Southern English.

However, I was never able to find any white Southerners, though I
quizzed speakers from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and
North Carolina. But, no one seemed to be able to say, with any
certainty. Thanks to the "Blue-Collar Comedians" series on Comedy
Central, I know for certain that blue-collar Southern whites, at
least, *do* use this bit of syntactic structure.

So, I'm idly wondering, is this a class thing among Southern whites?
(It isn't, among blacks. I use it and I don't come from the country or
from the streets. The only class distinction is "can't *anybody*" as
opposed to "can't *nobody*": "Can't any cat get into a coop.") Or was
my sample population simply too small - perhaps ten people - and too
narrow - all grad students in linguistics?

-Wilson
--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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