scholarly journals Relativization strategies in Earlier African American Vernacular English

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunnel Tottie ◽  
Michel Rey
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
Existential Sentence ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
Rule Analysis ◽  
American Vernacular

ABSTRACTThis article, which examines the system of relative markers in Early African American English as documented in the Ex-Slave Recordings (Bailey et al., 1991), is intended as a contribution to two areas of research: African American Vernacular English and the system of relativization in English. We found a significantly higher incidence of zero marking in adverbial relatives than in non-adverbial relatives. Among non-adverbial relatives, a variable rule analysis showed that non-humanness of the head as well as the function of the head as subject complement or subject in an existential sentence strongly favored zero relatives, and that prepositional complement heads disfavored zeroes. The lack of wh-relatives aswell as the frequency of zero subject relatives is interpreted as evidence that African American Vernacular English is a dialect of English.

Negation and the history of African American English

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darin M. Howe
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nova Scotian ◽  
Negative Form

ABSTRACTThis article describes the use of negation in three corpora representative of early to mid-19th century African American English: the Ex-Slave Recordings (Bailey, Maynor, & Cukor-Avila, 1991), the Samaná Corpus (Poplack & Sankoff, 1981), and the African Nova Scotian English Corpus (Poplack & Tagliamonte, 1991). The specific structures studied are the negative form ain't, negative concord to indefinites and to verbs, negative inversion, and negative postposing. It is found that Early African American English (i) is far more conservative than modern African American Vernacular English; (ii) is generally similar to Southern White Nonstandard English; and (iii) displays no distinct Creole behavior. In other words, our study suggests that the negation system of Early African American English derived directly (i.e., without approximation or creolization) from colonial English, contrary to the findings of Rickford (1977, 1995), Labov (1982), Winford (1992), De Bose and Faraclas (1993), DeBose (1994), and others.

Dialect accommodation in a bi-ethnic mountain enclave community: More evidence on the development of African American English

2002 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 743-775 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTINE MALLINSON ◽  
WALT WOLFRAM
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Language Change ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
Dialect Contact ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
Local Dialect ◽  
Western North Carolina

The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in reformulating the historical reconstruction of earlier African American English and the current trajectory of language change in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This case study examines a unique enclave sociolinguistic situation – a small, long-term, isolated bi-ethnic enclave community in the mountains of western North Carolina – to further understanding of the role of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in the historical development of African American English. The examination of a set of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for several of the remaining African Americans in this community supports the conclusion that earlier African American English largely accommodated local dialects while maintaining a subtle, distinctive ethnolinguistic divide. However, unlike the situation in some other African American communities, there is no current movement toward an AAVE external norm for the lone isolated African American teenager; rather, there is increasing accommodation to the local dialect. Contact-based, identity-based, and ideologically based explanations are appealed to in describing the past and present direction of change for the African Americans in this receding community.

Shanna Poplack (ed.), The English history of African American English. (Language in Society, 28.) Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Pp. v + 277. Pb $31.95.

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-316
Author(s):  
John Baugh
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistic ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
English Language ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
English History ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
History Of

Poplack and other contributors to this important volume are to be commended for an exceptionally well crafted book, with a succession of groundbreaking studies of African American English (AAE). Although this work will undoubtedly add fuel to the flames of historical linguistic controversy that continue to swirl around African Americans, Poplack and her colleagues go far to advance hypotheses and analyses that argue in favor of the English origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

Jim's language and the issue of race in Huckleberry Finn

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Cohen Minnick
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
American English ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
Software Program ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

While many critics have considered how Jim is represented in Huckleberry Finn, few have approached the question of how he is characterized via an examination of his speech. This article looks specifically at phonological and grammatical features of Jim's speech to determine whether or not they correspond substantially to features of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) documented by leading scholars. Using the LinguaLinks software program, it was possible to analyze Jim's speech in its entirety to the point where conclusions about characterization based on his language can conscientiously be made. The idea has been to look for occurrences of AAVE features in order to determine at least anecdotally whether Twain represents Jim's speech authentically, that is, in a way that indicates a real rather than stereotypical awareness of as well as sensitivity to real AAVE. Along with the analysis, the article continues with a discussion of attitudes towards social and regional variation of American English (AAVE in particular), the complexity of the work itself, and the critical and popular responses to it.

Defining the envelope of linguistic variation: The case of “don't count” forms in the copula analysis of African American Vernacular English

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renée Blake
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
Quantitative Analyses ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
Variable Analysis

ABSTRACTEver since Labov, Cohen, Robbins, and Lewis's (1968) pioneering study, it has been commonplace to set aside certain tokens in analyzing variability in the English copula as “don't count” (DC) forms. These cases are most often occurrences of the copula that exhibit categorical behavior (as with the full copula in clause-final position), as well as those that are ambiguous or indeterminate. In this article, I propose a set of copula forms that should be set aside from variable analysis as instances of DC forms to allow for systematic comparisons among studies. I review the major alternative descriptions of DC copula cases in the literature and analyze the behavior of the traditional DC categories. New data are presented to support the exclusion of particular DC cases from analyses of copula variability. Among the conclusions are that [was], [thas], and [is] should be excluded from quantitative analyses of variation in the copula because of their invariant status, and that a number of tokens commonly included (e.g., questions) should be excluded on various grounds.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document