• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.36
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• pp.211-240
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• 2014

This is a cross-sectional study designed to analyze the correlation between the structural and social variables and the pattern of contraction and deletion of the copula verb in the speech of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers in Athens in Georgia, USA using a questionnaire. The results show that the frequency of copula contraction is higher than that of deletion in all factor groups including the age of the speakers where this study found that younger speakers tend to have higher frequency of contraction and deletion of the copula than older speakers. This study analyzes this as a function of the fact that younger speakers of AAVE are conscious of the linguistic and social differences between AAVE speakers and speakers of Standard American English (SAE) and they consciously make choices regarding which norm to use at which contexts to satisfy their communicative and socio-cultural needs. This sort of conscious social behavior is not likely to disappear with age rather it might increase as a correlate of the perceived physical, socio-cultural and psychological distance between AAVE speakers and speakers of other varieties. This study shows that such perceived linguistic, socio-cultural and psychological distance has negative effects on pedagogy and I proffer the remedy.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2002.02a
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• pp.36-49
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• 2002

One main complexity of the copula constructions concerns a mismatch between morphology and syntactic constituency: the copula seems to form a morphological unit with the immediately preceding element, whereas in terms of syntax the copula appears to take this as its syntactic complement. In capturing such mismatches, we show that the copula is treated as an independent verb at the level of tectogrammatical structure (or syntax tree), whereas as a bound morpheme at the level of phonogram-matical structure (or domain tree), in terms of Dowty 1992 (or Reape 1994). This paper, adopting the notion of DOMAIN in HPSG, shows that copula constructions are a subtype of compacting-constructions. These constructions compact the domain value of the copula and that of its preceding element together into one domain unit, eventually making it inert to syntactic phenomena such as scrambling, deletion and pro-form substitution. This construction-based approach provides a clean analysis for the formation of the copula construction and related phenomena.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.959-976
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• 2011

The expression no matter, combining with an interrogative clause X, expresses 'it doesn't matter what the value is of X' and displays many syntactic and semantic peculiarities. To better understand the grammatical properties of the construction in question, we investigate English corpora available online and suggest that some of the irreducible properties the construction displays can be best captured by the inheritance mechanism which plays a central role in the HPSG and Construction Grammar. We show that the construction in question has its own constructional properties, but also inherits properties from related major head constructions.