The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English : An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources

Main description: Based on a 500,000 word corpus of early sources collected from ex-slave narratives, ex-slave recordings, and interviews with hoodoo priests, this book reconstructs the English spoken by African Americans between 1830 and 1920. By means of detailed quantitative analyses, three linguistic features (negation patterns, copula usage, and relative marker choice) are interpreted along the lines of temporal change, regional diversity, and variation across gender. Additionally, some 300 non-standard letters written by African Americans in the 19th century are compared to the main corpus in order to identify differences between speech and writing The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher. Front Cover 1 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Dedication 6 Acknowledgments 8 Table of Contents 10 List of abbreviations 15 1. Introduction 18 2. Data and methods 29 3. Negation patterns in Earlier AAE 57 4. The copula in Earlier AAE 106 5. Relativization in Earlier AAE 173 6. Comparison of written and spoken Earlier AAE 229 7. Conclusions 271 Notes 308 References 328 Index 345