HYPERCORRECTIONS AND DIALECT FORMS IN THE COMPOSITIONS OF NATIVE BORN COLLEGE STUDENTS FROM GEORGIA (BLACK ENGLISH, REMEDIAL WRITING, DECREOLIZATION, SOUTHERN, DEVELOPMENTAL ENGLISH).
Item
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Title
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HYPERCORRECTIONS AND DIALECT FORMS IN THE COMPOSITIONS OF NATIVE BORN COLLEGE STUDENTS FROM GEORGIA (BLACK ENGLISH, REMEDIAL WRITING, DECREOLIZATION, SOUTHERN, DEVELOPMENTAL ENGLISH).
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Identifier
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AAI8601706
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identifier
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8601706
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Creator
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WRIGHT, BARBARA HELEN WHITE.
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Contributor
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R.M.R Hall
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Date
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1985
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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A study of the writing of remedial college students, both black and white, born and raised in Georgia, showed the main source of errors in their college compositions were hypercorrections and dialect forms. A linguistic analysis revealed both morphemic and syntactic nonstandard linguistic features which could be attributed primarily to black students and other nonstandard features which were used equally by black and white students. The 146 informants (94 black and 52 white) were upwardly mobile, upper and lower working class, community college students. Socioeconomic skewing of the nonstandard linguistic features was not apparent in this sample.;The linguistic situation in Georgia must be viewed as a stage in linguistic change where the black students' language is evolving (decreolization) from black dialect toward standard English with overlays of hypercorrection and white southern dialect. The white students' language seems likewise to be evolving from white southern dialect toward standard English with overlays of hypercorrections and borrowing from black dialect. Hypercorrections which work by overgeneralization of rules to new contexts demonstrate the students' knowledge of the rules of the target language, give clues to the working of the human brain, and trace language change in progress. Hypercorrections, often indistinguishable from the dialect forms themselves, are the key to disambiguating many of the underlying dialect forms found in the compositions. Of special interest to the linguist are the zero hypercorrect forms resulting from reversal of the negative concord rule and loss of the invariant be of Black English.;A post creole continuum model is used to compare the frequencies by black and white students of the four primary nonstandard morphological features (which statistically define the black dialect): nominal final -s, subject verb agreement, final -ed, and zero copula.;Among the nonstandard syntactic features used by the college students, seven features defined the black students' dialect: negative deletion, confusion between participle and infinitive construction, resumptive subject pronoun predicate marker, the coordinating conjunction which, deleted relative pronoun in subject position, inverted word order of embedded clauses, and transitional devices.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Linguistics
