dropped 's

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> I'm very confused. Â Why isn't this more simply
> "She, my mother sister, and I used to call her
> 'Auntie" ..."? Â In which case, only "my mother
> sister" has a dropped 's (from "mother").
>
> There is some ambiguity whether "she" and "my
> mother's sister" are one person (in which case
> the "she" seems unusual, and unnecessary, but not incorrect) or two.
>

In other words, Joel, you have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of
anything relevant to the speech-pattern of black Americans except at
the level of the register used by what were once known as "the good
ones."

Well, WTF? I can't make any sense of "reverse substitution." It all
comes out in the wash.

But, seriously, Joel, you aren't under the impression that the speech
of blacks exists outside of any clarifying context, so that there's no
way for a random sentence spoken by a black person to have an
interpretation immediately available to a random white person, are
you? So that the interpretation offered even by other white people
requires some kind of special explication?

Perhaps I.m genetically unable to understand what, exactly, it is that
you don't understand.

The sentence isn't something that I simply pulled out of my ass and
then posted to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Rather, the sentence was *spoken*, with the usual concomitant
sentential stress patterns and intonation that provide meaning.

Yes, it is the case that a mere written transcription contains none of
that information and it is indeed possible to look at the sentence as
merely a random concatenation of words subject to whatever (lack of)
interpretation a reader cares to place on it.

But why would anyone interested in dialectology take that position?

--
-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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