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36 - Social and linguistic constraints on plural marking in Liberian English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

John Victor Singler
Affiliation:
New York University
Jenny Cheshire
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Summary

Plural marking in Liberian English

Liberian English, the range of English from pidgin to standard spoken in Liberia, is characterised by vast variation in the marking of semantically plural nouns. Some speakers never mark the plural, while others mark it most of the time. Of the 21 speakers examined in the study that forms the basis for the present article, three of them mark the plural 2 per cent of the time or less, while two others mark it 70 per cent or more. Speakers also vary as to how they mark the plural, whether by a postposed free morpheme, dεn (as in 1 and 2), or by an allomorph of suffixal -z.

  1. (1) ma frεn dεn

  2. ‘my friends’

  3. (2) di gε dεn

  4. ‘the girls’

This variation, both in frequency and choice of markers, is subject to disparate factors: social, phonological, and syntactico-semantic.

The impact of these factors on the frequency of plural marking was analysed by use of the varbrul programme. The data comprised 2,039 semantically plural nouns drawn from sociolinguistic interviews and conversations, with a maximum of 100 tokens taken from any one speaker.

Social factor groups

Singler (1984) has as its central point that Liberian English – as it extends from pidgin to Liberian standard English – is a continuum of the type proposed by De Camp (1971). The position of the speaker's output along the Liberian continuum correlates with the speaker's background.

Type
Chapter
Information
English around the World
Sociolinguistic Perspectives
, pp. 545 - 562
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

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