Recently I’m reading a children's picture book which is called Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. And I feel confused with the sentence “Everybody running to the coconut tree.”. At first I thought it as a nou

Doris

Recently I’m reading a children's picture book which is called Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. And I feel confused with the sentence “Everybody running to the coconut tree.”. At first I thought it as a noun phrase and "running to the coconut tree" is used to describe "everyone". But there is a period at the end of the sentence, so I got puzzled. I think this is not a sentence because the verb 'be' is removed. The complete sentence should go like “Everybody is running to the coconut tree.” as to my understanding. But then someone told me that maybe this is a kind of "Eye Dialect" which I've never heard before. I checked the wiki and the term is described as a commonly used way to “indicate that a character's speech is vernacular (nonstandard), foreign, or uneducated”. I think this could be the reason because the book readers are very young children. And then I've found a song called “Everybody Running to the Carnaval” , which shares the same sentence pattern with the texts in the book. And this song belongs to the album called "100 Years of Calypso". Then I checked the wiki and found out that Calypso is a style of Afro-Caribbean music. And West Indian dialect seems to be Caribbean English! The song’s original singer is Walter Ferguson who is a Panamanian-born Costa Rican calypso singer-songwriter. So the story could be set in the Caribbean? There are coconut trees and flip-flops… “Skit skat skoodle doot. Flip flop flee. Everybody running to the coconut tree.” And as to the flip flops mentioned in the book, "Skit skat skoodle doot" could be the sound word for walking in the flip flops?

Jul 22, 2022 4:18 AM

Answers · 9

Invitee

In the first picture, the English is reasonably standard, and “Everybody running to the coconut tree” could be an example of an utterance that isn’t technically a sentence, but serves the same purpose in colloquial speech or poetry. Some common shorter examples would include interjections, such as “Hey, you!”. In light of the second image that you found, I would say you’re probably right about it being a reference to a song in a Caribbean variety of English. It’s interesting to note that while most countries in Central America are Spanish-speaking (except for tiny Belize, formerly “British Honduras”), the entire Caribbean Coast of Central America has a population largely of Jamaican descent, speaking natively a variety of English Creole. They speak Spanish as well (as it’s the official language), and in modern times, many of them have been learning to speak a more standard variety of American English.

July 22, 2022

If it's a poem or a children's book, that's how it's written sometimes, for poems it's called poetic licence

July 22, 2022

I've found some evidence in this book: Creoles, Contact, and Language Change: Linguistics and Social Implications (I can't post the link because it disobeyed the rules here)

July 22, 2022