dropped 's

[Joel S. Berson]

What a lot of unkindness and rambling bullshit, Wilson.  I read the
sentence (which you gave without any previous context that might help
identify the "she"), and I didn't see where all the dropped 's's were
in the portion I quoted.  Why can't you simply tell me?

Joel

At 4/27/2011 10:45 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> > I'm very confused.  Why isn't this more simply
> > "She, my mother sister, and I used to call her
> > 'Auntie" ..."?  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
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org