Oetting Janna B, Newkirk Brandi L
Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA.
Clin Linguist Phon. 2011 Aug;25(8):725-40. doi: 10.3109/02699206.2011.553700. Epub 2011 Mar 31.
We examined children's productions of mainstream and non-mainstream relative clause markers (e.g. that, who, which, what, where, Ø) in African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) as a function of three linguistic variables (syntactic role of the marker, humanness of the antecedent and adjacency of the noun phrase head). The data were language samples from 99 typically developing 4-6-year-olds: 61 spoke AAE and 38 spoke SWE. The majority of the children's relative clauses included mainstream markers. Non-mainstream markers were rare, with 3-6% involving Ø subjects and 2% involving what. The children produced who exclusively as subjects and with human antecedents, where exclusively as locatives and with non-human antecedents and Ø and what primarily as direct objects or objects of prepositions and with non-human antecedents. Although AAE- and SWE-speaking children produce some non-mainstream relative markers, the majority of their markers are mainstream. Their use of relative markers is also influenced by linguistic variables in ways that are consistent with a wide range of mainstream and non-mainstream English dialects. These findings show across-dialect similarity in children's relative clauses, even though characterisation of relative clauses as a contrastive dialect structure remains justified.
我们研究了非裔美国英语（AAE）和美国南方白人英语（SWE）中儿童对主流和非主流关系从句标记（如that、who、which、what、where、零标记）的使用情况，该使用情况是三个语言变量（标记的句法作用、先行词的人性特征以及名词短语中心语的邻接性）的函数。数据来自99名发育正常的4至6岁儿童的语言样本：61名说非裔美国英语，38名说美国南方白人英语。大多数儿童的关系从句使用主流标记。非主流标记很少见，3%至6%的情况涉及零标记主语，2%的情况涉及what。儿童仅将who用作主语且先行词为人，仅将where用作地点状语且先行词为非人类，而零标记和what主要用作直接宾语或介词宾语且先行词为非人类。尽管说非裔美国英语和美国南方白人英语的儿童会使用一些非主流关系标记，但他们使用的大多数标记是主流的。他们对关系标记的使用也受到语言变量的影响，这些影响方式与广泛的主流和非主流英语方言一致。这些发现表明，尽管将关系从句描述为一种对比性方言结构仍然合理，但儿童关系从句在不同方言间存在相似性。
