This seminar will examine a selection of linguistic features available in African American English (AAE) by concentrating on the intricate system of rules and the outer factors that support them. We will see plenty of reasons why AAE is not mainstream English with mistakes, but rather a dual-component variety with an enriched inventory of expressive means. An issue which we will address from different perspectives is AAE’s contact situation with other varieties of English and to some extent with other languages. In this connection we will include the investigation of two dimensions: (i) the development of the variety in the course of language acquisition; (ii) the puzzles related to the historical development of AAE and the major hypotheses regarding its historical basis including its recent developments from a grammatical point of view.
References:
Green, L. (2002). African American English: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Labov, W. (1998). Co-existent systems in African-American English. In S. Mufwene et al., eds. African-American English. London: Routledge, 110-153.
Winford, D. (1998). On The Origins of African American Vernacular English—A Creolist Perspective: Part II: Linguistic Features. Diachronica 15: 99-154. |
