Date:  Fri, 7 Nov 1997 13:56:47 EST
From:  Larry Horn <LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU>
Subject: Re: basketball terms

Greg Pulliam writes,

>Another basketball usage that comes to me is the null-possessive, as in
>"Duke ball," or "Chicago ball," when the standard is "Duke's ball" or
>"Chicago's ball." I've heard this from basketball announcers who are
>otherwise speakers of "standard", but I'd guess that they've picked it up
>from the players. It seems to be a matter of s- deletion, which is common
>in AAVE.
>
>Any thoughts on this.
I tend to doubt it. I think the same construction has been used in broad-
casting football for generations, going back to the pre-TV era: Notre Dame
ball on the Michigan 35 (or whatever). And I also suspect it was used in
basketball before the trend to a preponderance of African-American players.
In both cases, the announcers would likely not have been AAVE speakers. In
any case, I don't think it's s-deletion but something more morphosyntactic:
Chicago ball, maybe, but Bulls' ball, not Bull ball.   --Larry