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.

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).

Eighteenth-Century Sierra Leone English

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Montgomery
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Nova Scotia ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nova Scotian

This essay examines the language of an expatriate community as found in letters and petitions written by African Americans who migrated to Sierra Leone by way of Nova Scotia in 1792. These documents provide some of the earliest first-hand evidence of African American English and contribute to debates about the history of that variety. The paper compares selected grammatical features in that variety to modern-day African Nova Scotian English for insights to the history of African American English and develops a case for the principled use of manuscript documents for reconstructing earlier stages of colloquial English.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Folk Perception of African American English Regional Variation

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Mitchell ◽  
Marivic Lesho ◽  
Abby Walker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American English ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
Uniform Structure ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Map Labeling ◽  
Perceptual Dialectology ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
The Us

Contrary to previous “sociolinguistic folklore” that African American (Vernacular) English has a uniform structure across different parts of the US, recent studies have shown that it varies regionally, especially phonologically (Wolfram, 2007; Thomas & Wassink, 2010). However, there is little research on how Americans perceive AAE variation. Based on a map-labeling task, we investigate the folk perception of AAE variation by 55 participants, primarily African Americans in Columbus, Ohio. The analysis focuses on the dialect regions recognized by the participants, the linguistic features associated with different regions, and the attitudes associated with these beliefs. While the perceived regional boundaries mostly align with those identified by speakers in previous perceptual dialectology studies on American English, the participants consistently identified linguistic features that were specific to AAE. The participants recognized substantial phonological and lexical variation and identified “proper” dialects that do not necessarily sound “white”. This study demonstrates the value of considering African Americans’ perspectives in describing African American varieties of English.

Another piece for the verbal -s story: Evidence from Devon in southwest England

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Godfrey ◽  
Sali Tagliamonte
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
North America ◽  
English Language ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
Linguistic Feature ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
And Function ◽  
Detailed Nature

This article aims to contribute (1) new data on verbal -s by systematically examining its behavior in Devon English (DE), a variety spoken in southwest England, and (2) a broader historical and cross-dialectal perspective for understanding the origin and function of verbal -s in nonstandard varieties of English in North America. We focus on the linguistic contexts of its occurrence from the diachronic and synchronic literature. The results show that verbal -s is conditioned by phonological, syntactic, semantic, and lexical factors. These include the few variable constraints on verbal -s attested throughout the evolution of verbal -s in the history of the English language. Moreover, DE exhibits patterns of verbal -s variability that have previously been associated with African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The detailed nature of these linguistic correspondences—not only in frequency of the features examined, but most importantly in the details of an entire set of internal linguistic factors conditioning them—reveal that verbal -s is a linguistic feature of AAVE that originated in British dialects.

Negative Concord in Child African American English

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 212-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
D'Jaris Coles-White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
American English ◽  
Clinical Importance ◽  
African American English ◽  
Double Negative ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
Double Negation ◽  
Cross Sectional

In this study, African American English (AAE)-speaking children's comprehension of 2 different types of double negative sentences was examined and contrasted with that of a comparison group of Standard American English (SAE)-speaking children. The first type of double negative, negative concord, involves 2 negative elements in a sentence that are interpreted together as single negation. The second type of double negative, called true double negation, involves 2 negatives that are interpreted as independent negatives. A cross-sectional cohort of 61 (35 AAE, 26 SAE) typically developing children ranging in age from 5;2 (years;months) to 7;11 participated. The children responded to story-based grammatical judgment tasks that required them to differentiate between negative concord and true double negation. Results revealed no statistically significant differences between AAE- and SAE-speaking children in the way they interpreted negative concord and true double negation. However, there were significantly more correct responses to negative concord sentences across combined groups. In particular, the older children (i.e., 7-year-olds) produced more correct responses to negative concord than did the younger group (i.e., 5-year-olds). Explanations for these findings are framed in terms of children's knowledge about sentences with 2 negatives, the constraints affecting the interpretation of 2 negatives that include negative concord, and the clinical importance of negative concord for assessing specific language impairment in child AAE speakers.

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