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The *amn't gap: The view from West Yorkshire1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2009

JUDITH M. BROADBENT
JUDITH M. BROADBENT*
Affiliation:
Roehampton University
*
Author's address: Roehampton University, Digby Stuart College, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PH, UKJudith.Broadbent@roehampton.ac.uk
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Abstract

The absence of I amn't for the first person singular present tense negative form is taken to indicate that there is a gap in the paradigm. Recent accounts take a morphosyntactic approach and phonology is largely ignored. Such accounts typically focus on contemporary forms of Standard English. This paper, in contrast, compares nineteenth-century and contemporary West Yorkshire (WY) aux+n't forms and pursues a largely phonological solution. The paper sets out to demonstrate that WY has never had a *amn't gap and that changes over the past century shed light on the *amn't gap problem. Contemporary WY is known to exhibit a phenomenon called secondary contraction, whereby shouldn't [ʃʊdʔ], for example, may be pronounced [ʃunʔ]. I argue that secondary contraction is responsible for the creation of homophones for amn't and aren't: [aːnt]/[aːt]. I will consider the possibility that certain aux+n't forms have become lexicalised and that this has triggered secondary contraction as a phonological repair strategy. With the analysis of WY data as a backdrop, the paper then pursues the possibility that lexicalisation may have occurred, at a much earlier date, in precursors of Standard British English (SBE). Indeed, it seems plausible that homophony for amn't and aren't may have led to prescription against new realisations of amn't. The paper will show that grammatically amn't has evolved in exactly the same way as other auxn't forms, and it is only commentators who have treated it differently. If this is so, the *amn't gap in SBE is man-made rather than grammatical in nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , July 2009 , pp. 251 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

[1]

Versions of this paper have been presented at the LAGB 2006 Meeting (Newcastle University), Surrey Morphology Group, Northern Englishes Workshop 2, and at research seminars at Leeds, Roehampton and Essex Universities. I'd like to thank all those who discussed the paper at these events, especially Dave Britain, Nancy Hall, Barry Heslewood, Andrew Hippisley, Wyn Johnson, Ken Lodge, Bill Palmer, Phil Tipton, Peter Trudgill and Katie Wales. I'd also like to thank Jen Coates, Dick Hudson, Rachael-Anne Knight, Annabelle Mooney, Evi Sifaki and Janet Watson for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Finally, I'd like to thank Jonnie Robinson of the British Library for his help, and two anonymous JL referees for their helpful comments.

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