Earlier African American English Research Articles

Revisiting Invariant am in Early African American Vernacular English

Scholars of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have generally assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of Black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier Black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in renditions of interviews with ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the interviewers. The author argues that the use of invariant am in a great many literary sources written by Black writers with sober intention, grammatical descriptions of Black speech that note invariant am as a feature, and the use of invariant am in regional British dialects imported to the New World suggest that invariant am was present in earlier AAVE and common among Black slaves and their immediate descendants, yet had largely disappeared by World War II.

Letter Perfect

This paper uses a multivariate analysis of 19th-century letters by semi-literate African American settlers in Liberia to investigate the frequency and distribution of the present perfect (PP) in earlier African American English (AAE). Despite descriptions elsewhere of the PP as marginal to AAE, it occurs here with great frequency, a finding attributed to the sensitivity of the form to genre differences. The linguistic factors conditioning choice between the PP and the preterite match those described for other varieties of English of that time period. This suggests that an English-like PP was part of the core grammar of the writers of these letters.

When I started to using BLUR

This article introduces BLUR, an electronic corpus of Blues lyrics from the early twentieth century, as a valuable resource for the study of syntactic phenomena in Earlier African American English and investigates the properties and origins of a peculiar construction found in it. The design of the BLUR corpus is presented, and methodological consequences resulting from the nature of the texts are discussed. Subsequently, a few noteworthy syntactic structures documented in it are briefly illustrated. The most challenging of these, a sequence of inchoative verbs (notably begin, start, or commence), the particle to, and a verbal –ing form, as in begin to falling, is then analyzed in some detail, considering syntactic constraints and historical documentation in potentially related varieties, represented by electronic corpora and other sources from Late Middle English to present-day dialects. Based on these findings, a hypothesis on the likely origins and diffusion of this construction is developed.

James A. Walker. The Ain't Constraint: Not-Contraction in Early African American English

James A. Walker. The Ain't Constraint: Not-Contraction in Early African American English

The Development of African American English, and: The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English: An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources (review)

The Development of African American English, and: The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English: An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources (review)

S marks the spot? Regional variation and early African American correspondence

The different population ecologies of slavery-era America necessitate an investigation into the issue of regional variation in Early African American English (AAE). This article addresses this issue through the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence, a corpus of letters written by semiliterate African American settlers in Liberia between 1834 and 1866. We investigate nonstandard verbal -s and its conditioning by linguistic and social factors, including each writer's regional origin in the United States. Results show that, despite differences in overall rates across regions, the linguistic conditioning largely remains constant. These results suggest that subtle regional distinctions in Early AAE existed when specific settlement and population ecologies encouraged them, but that the shared history and circumstances of language contact and development led to an overall identity of forms and conditioning factors across regional varieties.The data on which this study is based are taken from the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence (OREAAC; Van Herk & Poplack, 2003), housed in the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. Financial support was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in the form of a postdoctoral fellowship to the first author. Earlier versions of the analyses reported here were presented at meetings of the American Dialect Society (Chicago, January 2000) and the Canadian Linguistics Association (University of Toronto, June 2002). We thank the audiences at these presentations for their comments and suggestions, and we thank Shana Poplack and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors are our own responsibility.

The ain't constraint: Not-contraction in early African American English

Studies of negation in African American English (AAE) typically focus on its most salient exponents, ain't and negative concord. Because ain't arose during the development of auxiliary- and not-contraction in Early Modern English, an interesting question is whether constraints on ain't can be attributed to more general constraints on contraction. This article examines the constraints on not-contraction in three varieties argued to be representative of Early AAE. Although the analysis is complicated by the ever-narrowing variable context of ain't and by the competition of not-contraction with auxiliary contraction, results are largely parallel across the three varieties, pointing to a common origin. The parallels between ain't and not-contraction provide evidence that ain't is the extension of more general processes of contraction. The most consistent effect, the presence of negative concord, is argued to reflect a recurrent process of reinforcement in the history of English negation.The data on which this study is based were extracted from corpora housed in the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. I gratefully acknowledge Professor Shana Poplack's permission to use these data. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society (Washington, DC, January 2001) and the third U.K. Language Variation and Change conference (York, U.K., July 2001). The analysis benefited from discussions with and comments from Greg Guy, Dennis Preston, Jennifer Smith, and Gerard Van Herk, as well as several anonymous reviewers. Special thanks go to Sali Tagliamonte and Malcah Yaeger-Dror, whose comments substantially improved the article, and to Anthony Warner for help with translating the Old English examples. Any remaining errors are my own responsibility.

Review of The historical evolution of Earlier African American English: An empirical comparison of earlier sources, by Alexander Kautzsch

Review of <i>The historical evolution of Earlier African American English: An empirical comparison of earlier sources</i>, by Alexander Kautzsch

The English History of African American English (review)

Reviewed by: The English history of African American English ed. by Shana Poplack John M. Lipski The English history of African American English. Ed. by Shana Poplack. Malden, MA & Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Pp. xix, 277. The eight essays in this volume deal with the reconstruction of African American vernacular English and the determination of its possible origins in an earlier ‘plantation creole’. All make use of contemporary evidence from vestigial speech communities representing the African American diaspora of the nineteenth century, in Nova Scotia, Liberia, and the Samaná Peninsula of the Dominican Republic, as well as the WPA ex-slave recordings, and attestations of earlier AAE. Taking different paths and applying different methodologies, all converge on a single conclusion, that AAE was never a creole, and while intersecting with pidgins and creoles throughout its history, it always drew more heavily on British roots. Many of the relevant features have disappeared from modern standard British English while some divergences between contemporary AAE and other American and British dialects are relatively recent, with the divergence continuing to increase. The volume begins with an extensive introductory chapter by the editor, in which the debate over the origins of AAE is summarized and critiqued, the various AAE diaspora varieties are presented, and relevant linguistic variables are introduced. Poplack stresses the tenacity of enclaves in resisting contact-induced linguistic changes which makes these diaspora communities ideal candidates in the reconstruction of AAE. This essay and the remaining contributions are predicated on the feasibility of using the diasporic communities as essentially undistorted specimens of earlier AAE, a task to which P devotes considerable attention. The following two chapters form a section of morphophonological variables. James Walker’s ‘Rephrasing the copula: Contraction and zero in early African American English’ uses AAE diaspora data to question the creole origins of modern AAE copula deletion. Walker isolates prosodic factors that condition both copula contraction and deletion and calls for a finer-grained approach to the historical reconstruction of the copula in all earlier forms of English. Shana Poplack, Sali Tagliamonte, and Ejike Eze offer ‘Reconstructing the source of early African American English plural marking: A comparative study of English and creole’. Using data from Nova Scotia, Samaná, and the ex-slave recordings, the authors find plural marking to be more variable than in contemporary AAE and present disambiguation and phonological context as criteria for maintaining English plural marking. Comparative data from Nigerian pidgin English reveal no phonological conditioning. The authors claim that early AAE inherited a variable plural marking from English, to which phonological conditioning was added. Darin Howe and James Walker make the first contribution to the section on morphosyntactic variation with ‘Negation and the creole-origins hypothesis: Evidence from early African American English’. Howe and Walker also examine data from Afro-Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and the slave recordings to demonstrate common patterns which in turn differ from negation patterns found in most English-based creoles. The authors dispute the creole-origins theory of AAE while pointing out parallels between early AAE negation and nonstandard white English dialects; they trace both AAE and nonstandard white English negation to colonial English antecedents. Sali Tagliamonte and Jennifer Smith compare isolated British English dialects and earlier AAE varieties in ‘Old was, new ecology: Viewing English through the sociolinguistic filter’. Invariant was (I was, we was, etc.) occurs not only in AAE but also in other English dialects; as an example, an isolated Scottish dialect is compared with Afro-Nova Scotian and white Nova Scotian dialects. After tracing the historical demographics of the three communities, the authors conclude that invariant was in AAE is more likely to stem from earlier (in this case, Scottish) English dialects rather than from an AAE-internal development. In their view, the study casts doubt ‘about the extent to which ethnicity is the basic underlying factor which best accounts for linguistic differences between AAVE and other varieties of North American English’. The first study of syntactic variables is Gerard Van Herk’s ‘The question question: Auxiliary inversion in early African American English’. Using data from Samaná, Nova Scotia, and the...

Using the past to explain the present: Tense and temporal reference in Early African American English

This study reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English by investigating the linguistic factors conditioning several variables within the domain of present temporal reference in three representative varieties. Previous studies have focused only on the opposition between Ø and -s in the present tense, ignoring other morphosyntactic constructions. Expanding the variable context to present temporal reference, I demonstrate that different constructions convey different aspects: the previously noted association between -s and habitual aspect is confirmed, but Ø is also associated with an aspectual distinction—that of duration. The progressive is used most often with nonstative verbs to denote durative aspect, whereas its much rarer use with statives appears to reflect an older stage in its “grammaticization.” Combining variationist analysis with the comparative method, this reconstruction provides linguistically meaningful explanations of the observed variability and places it within the context of the development of the English language.

The regional context of earlier African American speech: Evidence for reconstructing the development of AAVE

Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historical and current development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) remain unresolved. This study utilizes a unique sociolinguistic situation – a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina – to address questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for a sample of four different generations of African Americans and a baseline European American group shows that considerable accommodation of the localized dialect occurred in earlier African American speech. Nonetheless, certain dialect features – e.g., copula absence and 3rd person verbal s marking – were distinctively maintained by African Americans in the face of localized dialect accommodation; and this suggests long-term ethnolinguistic distinctiveness. Cross-generational change among African Americans indicates that younger speakers are moving away from the localized Pamlico Sound dialect toward a more generalized AAVE norm. Contact-based and identity-based explanations are offered for the current trend of localized dialect displacement.

Relativization strategies in Earlier African American Vernacular English

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 ofwh-relativesaswell 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

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, &amp; Cukor-Avila, 1991), the Samaná Corpus (Poplack &amp; Sankoff, 1981), and the African Nova Scotian English Corpus (Poplack &amp; 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.

Language in the Uncle Remus Tales

Previous articleNext article No AccessLanguage in the Uncle Remus TalesLee PedersonLee Pederson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 82, Number 3Feb., 1985 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391385 Views: 5Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1985 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Alexander Kautzsch Dialect in early African American plays, (Jul 2022): 65–86.https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g66.04kauAlexander Kautzsch Chapter 11. Morphosyntactic features in earlier African American English, (Nov 2019).https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.11kauDavid G. Cox “Half Bacchanalian, Half Devout”: White Intellectuals, Black Folk Culture, and the “Negro Problem”, American Nineteenth Century History 16, no.33 (Nov 2015): 241–267.https://doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2015.1095441Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer H, (Jan 2004): 413–474.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-02952-2_8