Date:  Mon, 24 Nov 1997 08:44:52 CST
From:  Ellen Johnson <Ellen.Johnson[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]WKU.EDU>
Subject: Re[2]: vernacular

   Yes, Ron has indeed gone on about our inconsistencies in discussing
   "the vernacular" for some time and he is my main (positive)
   inspiration. But I wonder: if no one will listen to this
   distinguished old-timer, why will they care what I say?? Ah, well,
   I'll continue on nevertheless.

   The negative motivation was my shock at hearing Labov say on the radio
   that only poor, inner-city blacks *really* speak AAVE, that anyone who
   has learned to code-switch can never go back to speaking the
   vernacular in a way that is grammatically consistent. I shouldn't
   have been shocked; it is the logical extension of his idea that
   people who have been exposed to more dialects will mix them. It makes
   sense on one level (and he does have the quantitative evidence), but
   it bothers me on another. Like Orton's Survey of English Dialects
   where only the most provincial "folk" speakers were interviewed for
   the same reason: to obtain the "purest", uncontaminated nonstandard
   varieties.

   I guess my problem with this is twofold. 1) it shows that we are
   still firmly entrenched in structuralism, looking for behavior that we
   can write neat rules for and 2)it leads us to focus on speech that is
   not really the common, everyday speech for most people in our society,
   what I thought "vernacular" was supposed to mean. Or do I have too
   much of a middle-class bias here?

   Thank you all for your input. Terry is always refreshingly
   oppositional to the party line. Dennis and Sali have been a big help
   to me in the past and continue to give me new things to think about.
   Ellen
   ellen.johnson[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]wku.edu
   http://www.wku.edu/~ejohnson