Chapter published in:
Keeping in Touch: Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world
Edited by Raymond Hickey
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 10] 2019
► pp. 239–260

Chapter 11
Morphosyntactic features in earlier African American English

A qualitative assessment of semi-literate letters

The present study contrasts two subcorpora of the Corpus of Earlier African American English, one consisting of letters and one of transcribed speech with a view to determining the relative non-standardness of the language in both subcorpora. By using the set of features laid out in the Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English (WAVE; Kortmann and Lunkenheimer 2012) the attestations and their relative frequency in both subcorpora were determined and scrutinised. The analysis shows that letters are relatively more standard in their language than transcribed speech and this is assumed to be due to letter writers awareness of non-standard structures in vernacular speech and avoid them in written language.
Keywords: Corpus of Earlier African American English , semi-literate letters, transcribed speech, non-standard language, Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English , feature comparisons
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The WAVE features in a Corpus of earlier African American English – Transcribed speech (CEAAE-TS)
  • 3.A corpus of letters written by semi-literate African Americans (CEAAE-L)
  • 4.WAVE features in semi-literate letters
    • 4.1Non-standard morphosyntactic features in semi-literate letters
    • 4.2Zooming into features
      • 4.2.1A-features in CEAAE-TS and their attestation in CEAAE-L
        • 4.2.1.1A-features found in CEAAE-L
        • 4.2.1.2A-features absent from CEAAE-L
      • 4.2.2B-features in CEAAE-TS and their attestation in CEAAE-L
        • 4.2.2.1B-features found in CEAAE-L
        • 4.2.2.2B-features absent from CEAAE-L
      • 4.2.3Features more prominent in CEAAE-L than in CEAAE-TS
  • 5.Summary and conclusion
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.11kau
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