Document19

.docx

School

Florida International University *

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Course

1101

Subject

Linguistics

Date

Apr 3, 2024

Type

docx

Pages

1

Uploaded by justgivemethetest

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The main idea of the story, "African American Language is Not Good English" by Jennifer M. Cunningham, is about how African American Language should not be considered flawed English because it does not follow the same rules as the English dialect. Instead, African American Language has many rules: grammatical, phonological, and morphological rules. The author is trying to get this point across to a general audience and teachers. It is meant for teachers because the author mentioned how teachers should teach their students to navigate Standard American English but not suggest a linguistic hierarchy. She wants the teachers to help students realize that different audiences have different languages that can help benefit in certain situations. In addition, for students to learn that the Standard English Language is other than the African American Language, but neither language is superior. Throughout the story, the author uses examples to show the different African American language rules that make them different from the Standard English Language. Cunningham uses organization throughout the story to get her point across. She gives insight into how people see the African American Language as not standard because it does not follow Standard English. She explains how the Standard English Language has rules, as does the African American Language. The audience gets a little background of the origin of the African American Language with two hypotheses: it is a dialect with English origins. The other is that the African American Language was developed through different languages with different linguistics. Since the audience might not know what linguistics is, she explained it in the following paragraph and gave an example of linguistics to help the reader understand. Cunningham talks about the grammatical and phonological rules in the African American Language and explains how they do not require verbs like "be, am, etc., because they have a grammatical construction known as zero copula. She continues to explain in the following paragraphs negative concord and phonological structure. Cunningham helps the audience understand what all these words mean and gives examples. Towards the end, Cunningham directs a message to teachers and talks about the Standard English Language being different from African American Language. Still, neither language is better than the other, and they should just be considered two different languages instead of judging them as one language. Cunningham shows a well-organized explanation of her main point to help get it across to her audience.
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