Example of problem of
contextual appropriateness of certain utterances:
One day I was driving in the
car, with my son, who was about 9 years old, sitting behind me, and
kicking the back of the seat. I said to him,
- "Please stop
kicking the seat." to which he answered:
- "You lie like a damn
dog!" (Phonetically, [yu læ læk a dæy@m daog]
This answer,
obviously learned from his friend Ben, whose parents grew up in rural
Louisiana, was inappropriate for a number of reasons:
-
Social: rural southern AAVE forms are not appropriate in a family of
northern SAE speakers.
- The truth value of my statement
can not be contradicted, since I had issued a command or
imperative form ( Stop kicking ... ) which cannot be
falsified.
My son had learned this utterance (and its
pronunciation) from his friend Ben, but had not learned how to use it
appropriately. What he probably wanted to do was produce an answer to my
imperative sentence, one that would make me stop trying to impose my will
on his behavior. He chose to give a `negative' answer that did not meet
his needs, or in fact the criteria for an appropriate, contextually
grammatical answer. As a 9
year-old grade-schooler, he was clearly beyond
the age of producing `ungrammatical' sentences, yet he produced an answer
that was inappropriate by two different measures. Obviously, Chomsky's
theories can not account for this kind of lack of competence, known in the
sociolinguistic literature as communicative competence.
haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu