For quite a few years I have worked with the interviews that
Joseph Sargent Hall recorded in and around the Smoky Mountains
of Tennessee and
North Carolina in 1939. Among other things, I
have prepared a transcribed corpus of these short interviews
(53,000+ words, 60 speakers all told), excerpts of which appear at
a website called “Appalachian English”, which was created in
2005 in connection with a dictionary Professor Hall and I co-edited
(Montgomery and Hall 2004). 1 More recently, a dissertation
student at Georgetown University contacted me seeking access to
the corpus for the purpose of studying what has been called
“McDavid’s Law” (Troike 1986), a sound shift whereby [z]
becomes [d] (both being co-articulated with glottal constriction or
a glottal stop) before a nasal segment in the contractions isn't,
wasn’t, etc. The form wasn’t was fairly plentiful (n=44) in the
corpus, but isn’t was not, and not because speakers usually framed
their responses in the past tense.
In unambiguous third-singular
contexts for be, isn’t occurred only three times, compared to nine
instances of ain’t, the dominant form. Two other variants were
found, and these form part of the story to unfold later in this paper.
Unfortunately, there were simply too few instances of isn’t on 32
which to base any generalization and thus no point in sharing the
Hall corpus with the disappointed student. I had become intrigued,
however, about the prevalence of ain’t, especially after finding that
aren’t never occurs in the corpus (vs. four instances of ain’t and
again two other variants) in third-plural and other contexts where
are is usually found in mainstream American English.
https://appalachian-english.library...use_ain_t_and_auxiliary_contraction_.pdf
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