Typical Forms and Atypical Forms

In this week’s readings, I find there is a common issue between Lupyan (2016) and Rickford (1997): typical forms versus atypical forms.

Lupyan (2016) maintains that a category label tends to activate a prototypical form when it is used to represent a certain concept. For example, when people are asked to draw a shape, if they hear the category name “triangle” and, they tend to draw horizontally oriented isosceles and equilateral triangles. What makes these two kinds of triangles typical? The reason might be a general preference for simplicity/minimization of description length. Describing a horizontally oriented isosceles triangle requires two bits of information: the apex angle and the length of one side. Specifying an equilateral triangle only requires one bit: the length of single side. The function of prototypical forms is that it might help to facilitate communication and reasoning from specifics to generics.

Richford (1997) summarizes the contributions from the African American speech community to sociolinguistics, including the development of variable rules (e.g. the contraction and deletion of the copula, as in She beautiful.) and frameworks for the analysis of tense-aspect markers, narratives and speech events, etc. However, sociolinguistics has not done sufficiently to reward the African American speech community, especially with respect to the teaching of reading and the language arts.

This problem might result from the dispute over the status of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).  Most linguistics regarded it as a “dialect” or variety of English. For many people, AAVE is an atypical form of English due to its ungrammatical structures and some other reasons.  As an atypical form, AAVE should not represent the “English”. Only the typical form, Standard English, should represent “English” because it could facilitate communication between people. If we edit books written in AAVE to teach reading, then we are teaching AAVE as a standard language. These people believe that such an atypical form of English should be corrected, not reinforced.  

However, some linguists recognize the legitimacy of AAVE as a language system. Linguistic Society of America issued statements to support this claim:

The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African American vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as "slang," "mutant," "lazy," "defective," "ungrammatical," or "broken English" are incorrect and demeaning.

For these people, AAVE is not a dialect of English or an atypical form of English. Instead, it is a different language. They argued that children could use AAVE as a bridge in learning Standard English, just like others used their first language as a tool to learn a second language.

As a non-English native speaker, I find it very difficult to decide whether AAVE is a dialect of English or a different language, but there is one situation that I can imagine: if Americans do not solve the dispute, the problem pointed out by Richford will remain.