Guy Bailey

African-American English : structure, history, and use

Introduction 1. Some Aspects of African-American Vernacular English Guy Bailey and Erik Thomas 2. The Sentence in African-American Vernacular English Stefan Martin and Walt Wolfram 3. Aspect and Predicate Phrases in African-American Vernacular English Lisa Green 4. The Structure of the Noun Phrase in African-American English Salikoko S. Mufwene 5. Coexistent Systems in African-American English William Labov 6. The Development of African-American Vernacular English, Focusing on the Creole Origin Issue John R. Rickford 7. Word from the Hood: The Lexicon of African-American Vernacular English Geneva Smitherman 8. African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscenity Arthur K. Spears 9. More than a Mood or an Attitude: Discourse and Verbal Genres in African-American Culture Marcyliena Morgan 10. Linguistics, Education, and the Law: Education Reform for African-American Language Minority Students John Baugh

The Divergence Controversy

T HE HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF the Black English Vernacular (BEV) is essentially a history of controversies.1 Initially, linguists were united in challenging the notion that BEV was the product of physiological differences between blacks and whites (the thick lips and lazy tongues theory) and then the notion that BEV was a deficient dialect, incapable of the sophisticated logical distinctions and categories that characterize higher-level discourse. Later, linguists debated among themselves, often acrimoniously, the relationships between black and white speech and the origins of BEV.2 In spite of the long and bitter polemics that developed during these latter stages, by 1982 William Labov, in the wake of the Ann Arbor decision, was able to assert that a consensus on BEV had emerged. Most linguists, he suggested, agreed that BEV is a subsystem of English which, although incorporating many features of Southern States English, has a distinct set of phonological and syntactic rules. Those rules are now aligned in many ways with the rules of other dialects but still show evidence of derivation from an earlier

Variation in subject-verb concord in Early Modern English

Determining the function of verbal - s in the Black English Vernacular (BEV) has been a major problem in sociolinguistics. Linguists have offered four answers to questions about the features origins and function, with - s seen as a case of hypercorrection, as a marker of durative/habitual aspect, as a variable marker of present tense (with the variation stemming from dialect mixture), and as a marker of historical present regardless of person and number. This article argues that confusion about - s results largely from four mistaken assumptions about it: (1) that - s did not exist in earlier varieties of BEV, (2) that the use of - s in the plural bears no relation to its use in the singular or to other processes such as the use of is as a plural or copula and auxiliary absence, (3) that - s has always functioned simply as a person/number marker in white vernaculars, and (4) that any role white vernaculars may have played in the variability of - s was a consequence of regional variation brought to the United States. This article addresses these assumptions by examining the function of - s , both in the singular and plural, and of plural is in the Cely Letters, written between 1472 and 1488, and by comparing the results to similar data in black and white vernaculars. The analysis shows that in the Cely Letters the presence of an NP subject strongly favors the occurrence of both singular and plural - s and also plural is . The same constraint operates on the same forms in older black and white vernaculars, and it affects copula and auxiliary absence as well. In the speech of younger blacks and whites, this constraint has begun to disappear as - s has become solely a marker of person/number agreement in white speech and as - s itself has disappeared in BEV.

The Emergence of Black English : text and commentary

1. Preface 2. Introduction 3. 1. Texts 4. 2. Commentary 5. Speaking of Slavery: The Historical Value of the Recordings with Former Slaves (by Escott, Paul D.) 6. Slave Narratives, Slave Culture, and the Slave Experience (by Graham, Joe) 7. Songs, Sermons, and Life Stories: The Legacy of the Ex-Slave Narratives (by Brewer, Jeutonne P.) 8. The Linguistic Value of the Ex-Slave Recordings (by Montgomery, Michael) 9. Representativeness and Reliability of the Ex-Slave Materials, With Special Reference to Wallace Quartermans Recording and Transcript (by Rickford, John R.) 10. Is Gullah Decreolizing? A Comparison of a Speech Sample of the 1930s with a Sample of the 1980s (by Mufwene, Salikoko S.) 11. The Atlantic Creoles and the Language of the Ex-Slave Recordings (by Holm, John) 12. Liberian Settler English and the Ex-Slave Recordings: A Comprative Study (by Singler, John Victor) 13. Theres No Tense Like the Present: Verbal - S Inflection in Early Black English (by Poplack, Shana) 14. Appendix 15. Bibliography 16. List of Contributors

Methodology of a Phonological Survey of Texas

The Phonological Survey of Texas was begun in the fall of 1988 to provide hands-on experience for graduate students in a phonetics course and to provide data on the extent of phonological variation and change in Texas. As a pedagogical tool, it provides samples from a wide range of speakers for impressionistic transcription, spectrographic analysis, and the study of phonological variation and change. As a research instrument, it is a spin-off of a National Science Foundation project on urbanization and language changed The NSF project examines the morphosyntactic and phonological reflexes of rapid migration from rural areas to towns and cities in Texas over the last 75 years. In addition to historical sources of data, it makes use of peer group and individual interviews conducted among blacks and whites in four Texas communities: Houston, Bryan, Atmore, and Springville (the latter two are pseudonyms). In examining the data from these sources, we noticed a number of remarkable differences between the speech of our younger and older informants; the data from our historical sources suggest that these are changes in progress. For example, younger whites, especially urban ones, seemed to be losing the distinction between /3/ and /a/ and losing initial /h/ in /hj/ clusters. Although younger blacks generally maintained the 1:)I-Ial distinction, they, too, seemed to be reducing the /hj/ clusters, but they seemed to be losing /j/ rather than /h/ (for further discussion of the variants of /hj/, see Kerr 1989). Since none of these apparent innovations is very common in data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, most of which were collected only 12-15 years ago, we wondered whether we were witnessing rapid phonological changes in progress or simply finding local variants that had gone

SOME EFFECTS OF TRANSCRIBERS ON DATA IN DIALECTOLOGY

The transcription of speech into a graphic code is a basic procedure in both dialectology and sociolinguistics, and typically, it is this graphic analog of speech that forms the data for analysis in both disciplines. The act of transcription, however, affects linguistic data in subtle, difficult-to-detect ways. This paper demonstrates some of those effects by examining impressionistic phonetic data in American linguistic atlases. The paper identifies three sources of transcriber effects in the data: (1) conceptual differences regarding the phonetic status of particular sounds (e.g., offglides of diphthongs) and how they should be transcribed, (2) normative differences regarding the phonetic values of particular symbols, and (3) changing scribal practices as transcribers discover the importance of phonetic details that they had previously overlooked. When transcriber effects such as these are not identified and accounted for in the analysis of the data, they can create misleading results

Demographic change and American dialectology in the twenty-first century

Dramatic demographic changes are rapidly reshaping the population of the United States in ways that make the research questions that motivated twentieth-century dialectology outmoded. This paper outlines some of the most important demographic changes currently affecting the United States and suggests some research questions that are implicit in those developments. While twentieth-century dialectology was driven by questions regarding the sociospatial structure of the Founder Dialects and their relationships to settlement history and British regional varieties, twenty-first-century dialectology must examine the linguistic consequences of newly emerging demographic divisions, the consequences of widespread urbanization, and the relationships between Anglo dialects and a rapidly growing non-Anglo population. These questions require some fundamental changes in how we do dialectology, but they also position the discipline in a way that will enable it to address fundamental social and educational issues that stand at the center of the intellectual life of the twenty-first century.

Locative inferences in medical texts

Medical research relies on epidemological studies conducted on a large set of clinical records that have been collected from physicians recording individual patient observations. These clinical records are recorded for the purpose of individual care of the patient with little consideration for their use by a biostatistician interested in studying a disease over a large population. Natural language processing of clinical records for epidemological studies must deal with temporal, locative, and conceptual issues. This makes text understanding and data extraction of clinical records an excellent area for applied research. While much has been done in making temporal or conceptual inferences in medical texts, parallel work in locative inferences has not been done. This paper examines the locative inferences as well as the integration of temporal, locative, and conceptual issues in the clinical record understanding domain by presenting an application that utilizes two key concepts in its parsing strategy—a knowledge-based parsing strategy and a minimal lexicon.