Academic Paper |
|
|
|
|
| Title: | S marks the spot? Regional variation and early African American |
| Author: | Gerard Van Herk |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Institution: | Memorial University |
| Author: | James A. Walker |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Homepage: | http://www.yorku.ca/jamesw |
| Institution: | York University |
| Linguistic Field: | General Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Historical Linguistics |
| Subject Language: |
English
|
| Abstract: | 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. |
|
|
|
|
This article appears in Language Variation and Change Vol. 17, Issue 2, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
|
|
|
|
Back
Add a new paper Return to Academic Papers main page Return to Directory of Linguists main page |
|
|
About LINGUIST
|
Contact Us
|
Report Broken Link
While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents. |
|
