Article published in:
World Englishes: New theoretical and methodological considerationsEdited by Elena Seoane and Cristina Suárez-Gómez
[Varieties of English Around the World G57] 2016
► pp. 61–84
He don’t like football, does he? A corpus-based study of third person singular don’t in the language of British teenagers
This paper compares the use of third person don’t versus doesn’t in the language of British teenagers and adults, based on the analysis of data from three comparable corpora. Findings indicate that third person don’t is used significantly more by teenagers than adults. This tendency is seen not only in declarative clauses but also in question tags, although to a lesser extent. Furthermore, in London teen talk the subject of the clause and the occurrence of another negative in the don’t sentence (negative concord) appear to play a significant role, while the type of main verb of the clause is somewhat secondary. Finally, while the speaker’s gender appears to be of no importance in the choice of third person don’t or doesn’t, the speaker’s ethnic group does seem to play an important role.
Keywords: negation, non-standard English, spoken English, variation, youth language
Published online: 25 May 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g57.04pal
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g57.04pal
References
Sources
COLT
: The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language 1993 Department of English. University of Bergen. Stenström, Anna-Brita, http://www.hd.uib.no/i/Engelsk/COLT/index.html
Andersen, Gisle
1998 Are tag questions questions? Evidence from spoken data. Paper presented at
the 18 ICAME Conference
, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2013 General extenders on the move? Using spoken corpora to study change in real time. Paper presented at
the 34 ICAME Conference
, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Anderwald, Lieselotte
Auer, Peter
2003 Socio-cultural orientation, urban youth styles and the spontaneous acquisition of Turkish by non-Turkish adolescents in Germany. In Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities [Pragmatics and Beyond. New Series 110], Jannis K. Androutsopoulos & Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds), 223–246. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Beal, Joan & Corrigan, Karen P
Bernini, Giuliano & Ramat, Paolo
Bresnan, Joan, Ashwini, Deo & Sharma, Devyani
Bybee, Joan L. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena
Cheshire, Jenny
Cheshire, Jenny, Edwards, Viv & Whittle, Pam
Cheshire, Jenny & Fox, Sue
2006 New perspectives in was/were variation in London. Paper presented at
the 35 NWAV Conference
, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA.
Cheshire, Jenny, Fox, Sue, Kerswill, Paul & Torgersen, Eivind
Fischer, Olga, van Kemenade, Ans, Koopman, Willem & van der Wurff, Wim
Fox, Sue
2012 Performed narrative: the pragmatic function of this is + speaker and other quotatives in London adolescent speech. In Quotatives: Cross-linguistic and Cross-disciplinary Perspectives [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 15], Ingrid van Alphen & Isabelle Buchstaller (eds), 231–258. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Gabrielatos, Costas, Torgersen, Eivind, Hoffmann, Sebastian & Fox, Sue
García, Ofelia & Wei, Li
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey
Jespersen, Otto
Kerswill, Paul, Cheshire, Jenny, Fox, Sue & Torgersen, Eivind
Kortmann, Bernd & Lunkenheimer, Kerstin
(eds) 2013 The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English [eWAVE]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://www.ewave-atlas.org/ (11 February 2013).
Littlechild, P
Lucas, Christopher & Willis, David
Miestamo, Matti
Nevalainen, Terttu
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio
Petyt, Keith M
Pichler, Heike
Quist, Pia & Svendsen, Bente A
Smith, Jennifer
Stenström, Anna-Brita
Stenström, Anna-Britta, Andersen, Gisle & Hasund, Ingrid K
Torgersen, Eivind N., Gabrielatos, Costas, Hoffmann, Sebastian & Fox, Sue
Tottie, Gunnel & Hoffmann, Sebastian
Trudgill, Peter & Hannah, Jean
Viereck, Wolfgang
Wiese, Heike
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio M.
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio Miguel
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 may 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.