required plural marking in 2PP

[Michael Newman]

No, I also noticed after this that they consistently used plural marked forms for 2pp address.
Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu



On Jul 8, 2012, at 10:01 AM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
> Subject:      Re: required plural marking in 2PP
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Could they have wondered whether they had to do their homework in the classroom?
>
> Benjamin Barrett
> Seattle, WA
>
> On Jul 7, 2012, at 11:56 PM, Michael Newman wrote:
>
>> 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.=20
>>
>>
>> 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.=20
>
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