Again, you’re missing the point. I can’t prescriptively judge whether something is grammatical or not, nor can anyone else. Grammaticality isn’t something which someone decides — a grammatical sentence is by definition a sentence which speakers of the language produce and understand. It is grammatical if people use it. If there is a particular dialect of English where they use isn’t as the first person singular form of the copula, then it is grammatical.
It would not be grammatical in the standard American English dialect, which I think is what you’re getting at. But you have to be careful with your terms here, because in the technical sense ‘grammatical’ means an acceptable sentence of the language, whereas I have a feeling your understanding of ‘grammatical’ means ‘how we were taught to write in school to communicate to other people that we have been educated’. My entire point is that there’s a difference.
You would probably call the sentence
He been had that job.
completely ungrammatical. In Black Vernacular English, however, it’s perfectly acceptable. What’s more, depending on the pronunciation of been, this sentence can communicate a tense that doesn’t exist in standard American English. In SAE it can only be communicated by adjunct material like ‘for a long time’. Ostensibly, this is more efficient.
It would not be grammatical in the standard American English dialect, which I think is what you’re getting at. But you have to be careful with your terms here, because in the technical sense ‘grammatical’ means an acceptable sentence of the language, whereas I have a feeling your understanding of ‘grammatical’ means ‘how we were taught to write in school to communicate to other people that we have been educated’. My entire point is that there’s a difference.
You would probably call the sentence
completely ungrammatical. In Black Vernacular English, however, it’s perfectly acceptable. What’s more, depending on the pronunciation of been, this sentence can communicate a tense that doesn’t exist in standard American English. In SAE it can only be communicated by adjunct material like ‘for a long time’. Ostensibly, this is more efficient.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_Eng...