8
7
CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter elaborates the theory of the research done by the researcher. It is divided into two parts. The first is the theoretical description of the research and
the second is the theoretical framework of the research covering all the theories in the first part which are summarized into one main idea that is clear and coherent.
A. Theoretical Descriptions
This part is divided into four topics. The first topic is Black English which covers the definition of Black English, its history, and its characteristics. The
second topic is Standard English. The third topic is Creole. The last topic is the theory of language use in society.
1. Black English
a. The Definition of Black English
Black English is a term that was originally intended and sometimes used for the language of all people of African ancestry, or for that of Black North
American people. Since 1996, it has been widely used to refer to African American Vernacular English distinctively non-standard Black United States
English, asserting the independence of the Standard English. The term became widely known in the U.S. in 1996 due to a controversy over its use by the
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8 Oakland School Board. According to Robert William, Black English or Ebonics
may be defined as the linguistic and paralinguistic features which on a concentric continuum represent the communicative competence of the West
African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendant of African origin. It includes the various idioms, patois, argots, idiolects, and social dialects of black
people especially those who have adapted to colonial circumstances Williams; 1975 as cited by Baugh, 2000.
b. The History of Black English
The beginning of Black English’s history was the development of Black English back to the time of slavery and slave trade. So, the history of Black
English must date back to about 1619 when a Dutch vessel landed in Jamestown with a cargo of twenty Africans. Smitherman, 1986 During the slave trade,
ships collected slaves from several different nations rather than just trading with one nation. The basis that justified this action was that; Africans from different
nations spoke different languages and could not communicate with each other, and thus were incapable to unite and overthrow the ships’ crew.
In 1744, the slave ship Captain William Smith wrote: ...the safest way to trade is to trade with the different Nations, on either Side the River, and
having some of every sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel, Stoller, 1975.
Upon arriving in America, all the slaves had to be able to communicate with
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9 their masters in some way. Thus, all slaves had to learn at least some degree of
English vocabulary. This established English as a common language among slaves and the only one language that all slaves had in common. Linguists
suggest that Africans developed a pidgin language with the English language
providing the vocabulary. c.
The Characteristics of Black English
William Labov Labov, 1969 stated that there are several special
features of Black English Vernacular that can be seen by these four subtitles in his journal of Ann Harbour School District Board; Martin Luther King Junior
Elementary School. 1
The Tense and Aspect System of Black English Vernacular The most prominent and the most frequent of the BEV aspect is habitual
be , as in She be sick. This habitual be is very important because it does not exist
in any other American dialect. The concept of aspect is the hardest to understand, if it is compared with
the concept of tense, for it communicates the shape of an event in time. Tense situates an event at a point of time although the way of looking the shape of an
event in time is not clear and distinct, but aspect represents the ways of looking at things so that the users know the context of the conversation. Because it is
often combined with tense, the term tense-aspect system created.
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10 The tense-aspect system in BEV is built on three words with long
vowels: be, do, and go. In BEV, some consonants l, s, z, r, d, v are more often missing than present, but final n does not disappear entirely. If it is not heard
as a consonant, it is heard as a nasal quality of the preceding vowels. The basic aspect system is made up of six words, namely:
Be Do Go
Been Done Gon’
The three root words carry the same basic meanings as other dialects of English. Be refers to existence, do to action, and go to movement. But in the
auxiliary they become specialized: be indicates a special kind of habitual or repeated state, do has lost its content, and is used to emphasize other actions or
carry the negative particle n’t, and go indicates a sense of movement towards confrontation, as in standard English go and.
In short, the special features of the BEV tense and aspect system can be mean as following:
Be “habitual,” applied to events that are generally so
Been “remote present perfect,” conditions that were so a long time
ago, and are still so Done
“perfective,” events that are completely andor really so Be done
“future perfective,” events in the future that are completely, really so
Been done “past perfective,” events in the past that are accomplished
and really so Steady
“persistently, consistently, and continuously so”
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11 Gon’
“future and less really so”
2 English Inflections in Black English Vernacular
BEV is often described as a series of absences. It looks like an over- simplified language “without grammar” for most people. It is said that BEV has
no plural, no past tense, and no possessive. Some English inflections are present more often in BEV than in other
dialects. One of these is the plural. While Standard English has no plural inflection in words like deer, sheep, and fish the corresponding Black English
Vernacular plurals are regular deers, sheeps, and fishes. The problem found with past tense is related to regular verbs ending in
-ed , where the signal of the past tense is confined to a single consonant, t or
d. This signal, in some ways, sometimes absent and present but it can be seen by several ways: First, it is always present more often than d or t in consonant
clusters that do not signal the past tense, like fist or old. Second, when –ed follows at or d as in wanted and a vowel breaks up the cluster, the final –ed
always present. Third, the past tense –ed is dropped less often before a vowel and more often in difficult consonantal combinations like mixed batter. Fourth,
the –ed never occurs where it is not wanted. It is never used in present tense, as in he walked home these days.
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12 Another problem is the parallelism of the case auxiliary and verb to be.
The finite forms is and are are sometimes present in their full-form, sometimes in contracted form, and sometimes entirely missing.
In short, the portrait of BEV inflections can be drawn of three distinct situations: features entirely absent from the underlying grammar of BEV,
features present in the grammar but variably deleted to a point hard to retrieve, and features that are generalized beyond the point of the standard language:
3 Loss of Information at the Ends of Words
The Black English Vernacular loses information at the ends of words in a more extreme way than other dialects. It tends to delete final r, l, t, d, v,
and other consonants. The following list contains some of the words that can be pronounced the same way. Each word stands for a member of a class of words:
all the words that rhyme with it. ABSENT VARIABLE
GENERALIZED Subject-verb agreement:
3rd singular [s] Regular tense [ed]
Regular plural [s]
Possessive[s]: noun adjuncts
Contracted copula [s] [r]
Possessive [s]: absolute form
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13 •
The deletion of final t or d can give: In simple words:
Cold= coal Must= muss
Tent= ten Field= feel
Paste= pace Pant= pan
In the regular past tense: Rolled= roll
Missed= miss Fanned= fan
Healed= heal Faced= face
Penned= pen In the past tense of irregular verbs:
Told= toll Lost= loss
Went= when Held= hell
Bent= ben Meant= men
With the general merger of i and e before n: Penned= pinned= pen= pin
Send= sinned= sin •
The deletion of lñngnp1057 and r can give: With the Southern deletion of the glide after back vowels:
Told= toll= tore= toe
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14 Sold= soll= sore= so
With the more common Northern pronunciation: Sore= Saul= saw
Cord= called= cawed 4
Ambiguities of Tense and Aspect The inconsistency results in multiple ambiguity, shown in this input-
output diagram: Teacher’s production
Heard as Intepreted as
They will be there →They’ll be there
They would be there →They’d be there
They be there Future
Habitual be Conditional
They have been there →They’ve been there
They had been there →They’d been there
They been there Present perfect
Remote present perfect Past perfect
The two situations where the grammatical information of classroom English may be neutralized and open three-way interpretation by the listener.
When a teacher uses Standard English said they will be there,it is heard as they be there
by BEV users which can be intepreted in three-way intepretation: future, habitual be, and conditional.
For all dialects, there are homonyms in speech that must be portrayed unambiguous. That principle will be represented in two sets of homonyms in
BEV.
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15 a
Long nasal e: They haven’t = They ain’t= They ‘e’
They aren’t= They ain’t= They ‘e’ They didn’t= They ain’t= They ‘e’
b Long nasal o:
They are going to= They gon’= They ‘o’ They do not= They don’= They ‘o’
They will not= They won’= They ‘o’ From the example above, it concludes two future forms and one present tense
form, all expressed in the same vowel in BEV.
2. Standard English