required plural marking in 2PP

[Michael Newman]

Once when I was teaching in high school in NYC, I left a class befuddled during a rant about their not turning in their homework. I had said something along the lines of, "you have to do your homework in this class." They just looked confused and one asked me who I meant. I figured that the problem was that I had said the bare "you," which they interpreted as strictly singular. To be understood I should have said "you guys." Now the class was virtually all Latino and Black, (mix of 2nd generation Jamaican American and African American). Spanish has a clean division of labor between singular and plural forms, but is anyone aware of this phenomenon in AAE or Jamaican? They mostly used a reduced form of you all (with /l/ typically vocalized), but the relevant point for me is not the form but the requirement for plural marking. 


This is the next logical step in the evolution of the English pronoun system to the extent that such steps can be described as logical. 



Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu

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