Cover not available
Part of
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
  • Appendix
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.11kau
References
Bailey, Guy, Natalie Maynor and Patricia Cukor-Avila
eds 1991 The Emergence of Black English. Text and Commentary. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berlin, Ira, Joseph R. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland
1982 Freedom. A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series II. The Black Military Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Berlin, Ira, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph R. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland
(eds.) 1985 Freedom. A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series I, Vol. I. The Destruction of Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Berlin, Ira, Steven F. Miller, Joseph R. Reidy and Leslie S. Rowland
1993 Freedom. A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series I, Vol. II. The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brewer, Jeutonne P.
1974 The verb be in Early Black English: A study based on the WPA ex-slave narratives. Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Google Scholar
Ewers, Traute
1996 The Origin of American Black English. Βe-Forms in the HOODOO Texts. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis, Michael
2013 Ozark English. In: Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds. ([URL]; 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie
2013 Bahamian Creole. In Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds. ([URL]; 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
Hyatt, Harry Middleton
1970–1978 Hoodoo – Witchcraft – Conjuration – Rootwork. Vol. 1–5. Washington: The Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation.Google Scholar
Kautzsch, Alexander
2002a The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English. An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002b Combining early sources: A new approach to the historical study of African American English. In Dieter Kastovsky, Günther Kaltenböck and Susanne Reichel, eds. Anglistentag Wien 2001. Proceedings. Trier: WVT, 57–73.Google Scholar
2012a English in Contact: African American English (AAE) early evidence. In Alexander Bergs and Laurel Brinton, eds. Historical Linguistics of English (Handbücher zu Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science [HSK] 34.2). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton 1793-1807 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012b Earlier African American Vernacular English. In Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds 2012: 126–140.Google Scholar
2013 Earlier African American Vernacular English. In Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds 2013 ([URL]; 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd and Kerstin Lunkenheimer
eds 2012 The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
eds 2013 The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. ([URL]; 2017-03-06).Google Scholar
Miethaner, Ulrich
2005 I Can Look through Muddy Water: Analyzing Earlier African American English in Blues Lyrics (BLUR). Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Miller, Randall M.
1978 Dear Master. Letters of a Slave Family. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, Michael, Janet M. Fuller, and Sharon DeMarse
1993 The black man has wives and Sweet harts [and third person plural -s] Jest like the white men: Evidence of verbal -s from written documents on nineteenth century African American speech. Language Variation and Change 5: 335–357. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, Michael
2013 Appalachian English. In: Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds. ([URL]; 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko S.
2013 Gullah. In: Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds. ([URL]; 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
Pederson, Lee
1985 Language in the Uncle Remus Tales. Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 82(3): 292–298. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perdue, Charles L., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips
1992 [1976] Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana and Sali Tagliamonte
2001 African American English in the Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rawick, George P.
(ed.) 1977/79 The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement . Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W.
1989 American Earlier Black English. Tuscaloosa/London: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. and Christian Wagner
2006 The variability of literary dialect in Jamaican Creole: Thelwell’s The Harder They Come . Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 21(1): 45–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simon, Beth Lee
2013 Colloquial American English. In: Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds. ([URL], Accessed on 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
Singler, John V.
1986 Copula Variation in Liberian Settler English and American Black English. In: Geneva Smitherman (ed.), Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, 129–164. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.Google Scholar
2013a Liberian Settler English. In: Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds. ([URL], 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
2013b Vernacular Liberian English. In: Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds. ([URL]; 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
Van Herk, Gerard and Shana Poplack
2003 Rewriting the Past: Bare Verbs in the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 18 (2): 231–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wiley, Bell I.
1980 Slaves No More. Letters from Liberia 1833–1869. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt
2013a Urban African American Vernacular English. In: Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds. ([URL]; 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
2013b Rural African American Vernacular English. In: Kortmann and Lunkenheimer, eds. ([URL]; 2017-03-09.)Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt and Erik R. Thomas
2002 The Development of African American English. Oxford, UK/Malden, MA: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Kautzsch, Alexander
2022. Dialect in early African American plays. In Earlier North American Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G66], ► pp. 65 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.