ABSTRACT
The following exercises focus on vernacular (nonstandard) dialects of English on several levels. (See the introductory chapters and the chapter on African American English for definitions of the terms dialect and vernacular.) First, they involve exercises that rely on “language intuitions.” By language intuitions, I mean the inner knowledge about language that comes from the fact that speakers of a language have internalized language patterns and therefore can make choices based on that knowledge. This knowledge stands apart from the ability to talk about language in technical terms. Everyone who speaks a language has language intuitions, whereas only linguistically trained professionals typically would have the knowledge to discuss these patterns in technical detail. Second, the exercises examine how judgments of linguistic well-formedness, or “grammaticality,” intersect with judgments of social acceptability. For many laypeople, linguistic grammaticality and social acceptability are not distinguished, but it is essential that this distinction be recognized in studying language, particularly in the study of language varieties that have been socially stigmatized. Grammaticality
Grammaticality refers to the conformity of a sentence or structure to the rules of the specific patterns of a language variety. For example, a sentence like The blue box is in the closet follows the rules for forming a sentence in English, whereas The box blue is in the closet is ungrammatical since it does not follow these general rules. This notion applies regardless of the social evaluation of a structure.
