Jespersen (1961:Vol. III, pp. 81, 132ff.) dubs the following constructions ‘contact-clauses’; Doherty (1993) gives them the more specific label ‘subject contact relatives’ (SCRs), a term we will adopt here.
(1a) There’s one woman in our street went to Spain last year.
(1b) It’s always me pays the gas bill.
(1c) I have one student can speak five languages.
(1d) He’s the one stole the money.
Though (1a–d) are no longer part of standard English, they are perfectly grammatical in many other English varieties, including BelE (Doherty 1993, 2000, Henry 1995), AAVE, and AppE, our object of study. All examples in (1) alternate with standard cases in which there is a relative pronoun or complementizer to the left of the second finite verb in these sentences, as in (2):
(2a) There’s one woman in our street who/that went to Spain last year.
(2b) It’s always me who/that pays the gas bill.
(2c) I have one student who/that can speak five languages.
(2d) He’s the one who/that stole the money.
In AppE, SCRs initially appear to be restricted to presentational contexts as well (cf. (3); Hackenberg 1972; Wolfram & Christian 1976:121). However, our own preliminary fieldwork results have shown that AppE also produces subject-RCs without a relative pronoun or complementizer in clearly non-presentational contexts — see (4a–c) (of which (4a) is from Wolfram & Christian 1976:121, and (4b,c) from the Dante Oral History Project).
(3a) I got some kin people lived up there.
(3b) He’s the funny lookin’ character plays baseball.
(3c) My grandma’s got this thing tells me about when to plant.
(4a) ’Cause they was this vampire that killed people come in it.
(4b) At first, you wouldn’t believe the characters come knocked on my door.
(4c) But he tied the company up some way to get a royalty off the timber was cut for the mines.
Unlike the SCRs in (1) and (3), the examples in (4) do not involve matrix clauses that introduce NPs as new players on the scene of the discourse. (4a) is particularly interesting in this connection because it contains two restrictive clauses — one of them (that killed...) is an excellent SCR candidate (its matrix clause being a presentational there-sentence) but is not in fact an SCR; the other (come in it, associated to people) is an SCR but occurs in a context where BelE would not support one.
In sum, AppE allows so-called SCRs, that is, subject relative clauses which lack a relative pronoun and a complementizer and are used in presentational sentences. Some AppE varieties also appear to allow subject relative clauses outside of presentational contexts, raising a number of research questions which will be addressed in this project.