Patrice Larroque Toulouse-Jean Jaurès University, Toulouse „The dialogic nature of nonstandard English.”
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this text is to describe nonstandard speech events from a dialogic point of view. Dialogism, as defined by Bakhtin himself, refers to the interplay between a speaker’s discourse and other uses of language which are exterior to her/him or related to former ones. Analyzing nonstandard utterances actually reveals the speaker’s ambiguity which combines two distinct discursive planes – attitudinal and predicative. Starting from the assumption that some of the nonstandard constructions (i.e. negative concord, existential it-clauses, preverbal done, and double modal constructions) date back to Early Modern English, I will take the view that nonstandard speech events exist in the context of a continuum, and contribute to a better understanding of the system.
Keywords: linguistics, nonstandard English, English grammar, dialogism, variation.