Abstract
Examples like ‘Can't nobody beat 'em.’ (‘Nobody can beat them.’) in African-American Vernacular English (aave) have the inverted form of questions but the falling intonation and sentence meaning of (emphatic) declaratives. Labov et al. (1968) concluded that this phenomenon of ‘negative inversion’ (ni) requires two overlapping but distinct syntactic analyses. Recasting them in current terms, these proposals are Aux-to-Comp movement, as in subject-auxiliary inversion in interrogatives, and a non-movement structure containing a null expletive subject. Two explanatory problems arise with the view that Labove et al. present: (i) why the single phenomenon of ni should find its expression in two distinct structures and (ii) why this inversion phenomenon is restricted to negative sentences.
Using ideas from Optimality Theory, we develop a syntactic account of the ni data that also directly addresses problems (i) and (ii). We show that the relevant aspects of the syntax of aave and Standard English (se) can be accounted for in terms of the different rankings of three relevant constraints. The account is driven in part by consideration of an apparent change since the 1960's in the acceptability of ni examples in embedded clauses.
Some problems which our research raises, but does not fully resolve, include a complete analysis of the function of ni structures, the explanation for the quantitative favoring of inverted over non-inverted structures, and the extent to which negative inversion in aave has changed since the 1960's, in particular whether it has become closer to similar structures found in se.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adamson, H. D.: 1992, ‘Social and Processing Constraints on Relative Clauses’, American Speech 67, 123–133.
Bailey, Guy and Natalie Maynor: 1987, ‘Decreolization’, Language and Society 16, 449–473.
Bailey, Guy and Natalie Maynor: 1989, ‘The Divergence Controversy’, American Speech 64, 12–39.
Baugh, John: 1983, Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure and Survival, University of Texas Press, Austin.
Blake, Renee: 1994, ‘Resolving the Don't Count Cases in the Quantitative Analysis of the Copula in African American Vernacular English’, paper presented at NWAV-XXIII, Stanford.
Butters, Ronald K: 1989, The Death of Black English: Divergence and Controversy in Black and White Vernaculars, Peter Lang, Frankfurt.
Chomsky, Noam: 1981, Lectures on Government and Binding, Foris, Dordrecht.
Chomsky, Noam: 1982, Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding, MIT Press, Cambridge.
Denning, Keith: 1989, ‘A Sound Change in Vernacular Black English’, Language Variation and Change, 1, 145–167.
Diesing, Molly: 1990, ‘Verb Movement and Subject Position in Yiddish’, NLLT, 8, 41–79.
Dunlap, Harvard G.: 1974, ‘Social Aspects of a Verb Form: Native Atlanta Fifth Grade Speech — The Present Tense of Be’, Publication of the American Dialect Society Nos. 61–62, University of Alabama Press, University, Alabama.
Estevez, Vez, Michael Galindo, Sonny Uriarte, and Angie Young: 1994, ‘Existentials and Multiple Negations in aave’, in J. R. Rickford et al. (s.), The AAVE Happenin' 1994: Student Research from Linguistics 73, Dept. of Linguistics, Stanford, pp. 57–73.
Fasold, Ralph: 1994, ‘The Distribution of Reflexives: Alternation, Variation, Violation’, paper presented at NWAV-XXIII, Stanford.
Fasold, Ralph, William Labov, Fay Boyd Vaughn-Cooke, Guy Bailey, Walt Wolfram, Arthur K. Spears, and John R. Rickford: 1987, ‘Are Black and White Vernaculars Diverging?’, Papers from the NWAV-XVI Panel Discussion, American Speech 62, 3–80.
Feagin, Crawford: 1979, Variation and Change in Alabama English, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C.
Green, Lisa: 1992, Topics in African American English Syntax: The Verbal System Analysis, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Grimshaw, Jane: 1993, ‘Minimal Projection, Heads, and Optimality’, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science Technical Report #4.
Guy, Gregory R. and Robert Bayley: 1995, ‘On the Choice of Relative Pronouns in English’, American Speech 70, 148–162.
Kitagawa, Yoshihisa: 1986, Subjects in Japanese and English, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; published 1994 by Garland.
Klima, Edward S.: 1964, ‘Negation in English’, in J. A. Fodor and J. J. Katz (eds.), The Structure of Language, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., pp. 119–210.
Koopman, Hilda and Dominique Sportiche: 1989, ‘Subjects, unpublished, UCLA.
Koopman, Hilda: 1984, The Syntax of Verbs: from Verb Movement Rules in the Kru Languages to Universal Grammar, Foris, Dordrecht.
Kuroda, Shige-Yuki: 1988, ‘Whether We Agree or Not: A Comparative Syntax of English and Japanese’, in W. Poser (ed.), Papers from the Second International Workshop on Japanese Syntax, CSLI, Stanford, and University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 103–143.
Labov, William: 1969, ‘Contraction, Deletion, and Inherent Variability of the English Copula’, Language 45, 715–762.
Labov, William: 1972a, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Labov, William: 1972b, Sociolinguistic Patterns, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Labov, William: 1972c, ‘Some Principles of Linguistic Methodology’, Language in Society 1, 97–120.
Labov, William: 1972d, ‘Negative Attraction and Negative Concord in English Grammar’, Language 48, 773–819.
Labov, William: to appear, ‘Coexistent Systems in African-American English’, in S. Mufwene, J. R. Rickford, G. Bailey and J. Baugh (eds.), African American English, Routledge, London.
Labov, William, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis: 1968, A Study of the Nonstandard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City, Final Report, Cooperative Research Project No. 3288, United States Office of Education.
Labov, William and Wendell A. Harris: 1986, ‘De Facto Segregation of Black and White Vernaculars’, in D. Sankoff (ed.), Diversity and Diachrony, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 1–24.
Ladusaw, William: 1992, ‘Expressing Negation’, in C. Barker and D. Dowty (eds.), SALT II: Proceedings from the Second Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory (Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 40), Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, pp. 237–260.
Martin, Stefan E.: 1992, Topics in the Syntax of Nonstandard English, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park.
McCloskey, James: 1991, ‘Clause Structure, Ellipsis and Proper Government in Irish’, Lingua 85, 259–302.
Nagy, Naomi and Bill Reynolds: 1994. ‘Accounting for Variable Word-Final Deletion within Optimality Theory’, paper presented at NWAV-XXIII, Stanford.
Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky: 1993, ‘Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar’, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science Technical Report #2.
Rickford, John R.: 1974, ‘Carrying the New Wave into Syntax: The Case of Black English BIN’, in R. W. Fasold and R. W. Shuy (eds.), Analyzing Variation in Language, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, pp. 162–83.
Rickford, John R.: 1992, ‘Grammatical Variation and Divergence in Vernacular Black English’, in M. Gerritsen and D. Stein (eds.), Internal and External Factors in Syntactic Change, Mouton de Gruyter, The Hague, pp. 175–200.
Rickford, John, Arnetha Ball, Renee Blake, Raina Jackson, and Nomi Martin: 1991, ‘Rappin' on the Copula Coffin: Theoretical and Methodological Problems in the Analysis of Copula Variation in African American Vernacular English’. Language Variation and Change 3, 103–152.
Rickford, John, Thomas Wasow, Norma Mendoza-Denton, and Juli Espinoza: 1995, ‘Syntactic Variation and Change in Progress: Loss of the Verbal Coda in Topic-Restricting as far as Constructions’, Language 70, 102–131.
Sells, Peter, John Rickford, and Thomas Wasow: 1993, ‘Negative Inversion in African-American Vernacular English’, unpublished, Stanford.
Spears, Arthur: 1982, ‘The Black English Semi-Auxiliary come’, Language 58, 850–872.
Weiner, Judith and William Labov: 1983, ‘Constraints on the Agentless Passive’, Journal of Linguistics 19, 29–58.
Weldon, Tracey: 1993a, ‘An HPSG Account of Negative Inversion in African-American Vernacular English’, unpublished, The Ohio State University.
Weldon, Tracey: 1993b, ‘A Quantitative Analysis of Variability in Predicate Negation in a Dialect of African American Vernacular English’, paper presented at NWAV-XXII, Ottawa.
Winford, Donald: 1992, ‘Another Look at the Copula in Black English and Caribbean Creoles’, American Speech 67, 21–60.
Wolfram, Walt: 1986, ‘Good Data in a Bad Situation: Eliciting Vernacular Structures’, in J. A. Fishman et al. (eds.), The Fergusonian Impact, Volume 2, Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of Language, Mouton de Gruyter, New York, pp. 3–22.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sells, P., Rickford, J. & Wasow, T. An optimality theoretic approach to variation in negative inversion in AAVE. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 14, 591–627 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133599
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133599