Rewriting the past

Abstract

This paper describes the construction of the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence (OREAAC), a corpus of over 400 letters written by antebellum African American settlers in Liberia. Identifying the most speech-like letters by the least literate authors, we constituted perhaps the largest linguistically useful corpus of diachronic African American English primary data currently available. We demonstrate the utility of the OREAAC through analysis of factors conditioning the variable expression of past temporal reference in nearly 2400 verbs. In these letters, zero-marking is favoured in weak verbs by a preceding consonant (a universal), and in strong verbs by lexical type (an English dialect feature). Factors associated with creole past-marking were either not selected as significant or inconsistent with creole predictions. These findings parallel those reported for varieties spoken in the African American diaspora (Poplack & Tagliamonte, 2001), confirming the value of semi-literate correspondence in exploring the history of linguistic variation in speech.