focuses on certain differences between Standard English (SE) and the African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) spoken in many inner-city and rural American communities / presents 2 points that are crucial for the treatment of languages that differ much more widely / 1st, vernacular languages—the ways that ordinary people ordinarily talk—are not 'ungrammatical' or otherwise imperfect approximations to standard or literary linguistic norms / 2nd, small changes in an abstract grammatical system may produce complex patterns of change on the surface of the language, magnifying the apparent differences (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved), no part of cognitive science illustrates the problem of abstract inference better than the interpretation of linguistic zeroes: the absence of the very behavior that we have come to observe / [discuss] the interpretation of such linguistic zeroes / engage a particular problem that has been the center of much linguistic research: t)