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.

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.

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.

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