Some African American English dialects have sentences like: I see. You see. She see. (Instead of Standard American English I see. You see. She sees.) At which level of linguistic structure does this dialectal variation exist?

Question

Some African American English dialects have sentences like: I see. You see. She see. (Instead of Standard American English I see. You see. She sees.) At which level of linguistic structure does this dialectal variation exist?

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

To analyze where this dialectal variation sits, we need to examine what aspect of language is altered in the examples.
Option 1: Semantic or lexical. This concerns meaning and vocabulary. The sentences retain the same meaning and the same words, just with a missing grammatical feature, so this option isn’t correct.
Option 2: Syntactic or grammatical. This would involve changes in sentence structure or order. The word order here remains the same as in Standard American English; only the verb form changes, so the syntactic structure is not the primary site of variation.
Option 3: Morphological. Morphology covers the internal form of words, including affixes and agreement markers. The key difference in the dialectal examples is the absence of the third-person singular -s in 'sees' (i.e., 'She see' vs. Standard 'She sees'), which is a morphological feature affecting the verb's surface form.
Option 4: Phonetic or Phonological. This concerns pronunciation and sound systems. The question focuses on written or surface form variation in the verb, not on how it is pronounced, so this is not the best label for the observed variation.
In summary, the dialectal variation here centers on morphological marking (the lack of the -s agreement on the verb), not on changes in meaning, syntax, or pronunciation, which points to Morphological as the appropriate level of linguistic structure.

LING 200 A Homework 6 (Socioling)

Some African American English dialects have sentences like: I see. You see. She see. (Instead of Standard American English I see. You see. She sees.) At which level of linguistic structure does this dialectal variation exist?

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