African American Vernacular English Features, Evolution, Educational Implications

by Rickford, John Russell

• ISBN13: 9780631212454
• ISBN10: 0631212450
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-07-09
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

In response to the flood of interest in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) following the recent controversy over Ebonics, this book brings together sixteen essays on the subject by a leading expert in the field, one who has been researching and writing on it for a quarter of a century. Rickford's essays cover the three central areas in which questions continue to come in from teachers, students, linguists, the news media, and interested members of the public: bull; bull;What are the features of AAVE/Ebonics and how is it used? bull;What is its evolution and where is it headed? bull;What are its educational implications? The answers to these questions are sometimes matters of controversy even within linguistics, the scientific study of language, but Rickford's essays - written between 1975 and 1998 - provide an informed commentary on them based on systematic research rather than the opinionated misinformation that dominated media commentary on Ebonics.

Author Biography

John R. Rickford is the Martin Luther King Centennial Professor of Linguistics and African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford University. He is also the Director of the thirty-year-old degree-granting Program in African and Afro-American Studies, and President of the International Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles, and several books, including Dimensions of a Creole Continuum (1987), editor of A Festival of Guyanese Words (1978), Sociolinguistics and Pidgin-Creole Studies (1988), and co-editor of Analyzing Variation in Language (1987).

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface	x
Preface	xii
Foreword	xxiv
Acknowledgments	xxvii
Part 1 Features and Use	1	(154)
Phonological and Grammatical Features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE)	3	(12)
Introduction	3	(1)
The features of AAVE	4	(5)
Variation in AAVE feature use by social class, age, gender, and style	9	(2)
The distinctiveness of AAVE, vis-a-vis other American varieties	11	(1)
Concluding remarks	11	(4)
Notes	12	(3)
Carrying the New Wave into Syntax: The Case of Black English BIN	15	(19)
Introduction	15	(4)
Three issues in the study of Black English BIN	19	(12)
Conclusion	31	(3)
Notes	32	(2)
Preterite Had + Verb -ed in the Narratives of African American Preadolescents	34	(27)
Christine Theberge-Rafal
The preterite vs. the pluperfect	34	(4)
Quantitative and qualitative analysis of EPA examples	38	(10)
Use of preterite and pluperfect had by other speakers	48	(6)
Conclusions and directions for future research	54	(1)
Appendix	55	(6)
Notes	57	(4)
Rappin on the Copula Coffin: Theoretical and Methodological Issues In the Analysis of Copula Variation in African American Vernacular English	61	(29)
Arnetha Ball
Renee Blake
Raina Jackson
Nomi Martin
Which forms constitute the variable?	62	(1)
How should frequencies of ``contraction'' and ``deletion'' be computed?	63	(3)
Is and are	66	(4)
Labov, Straight, and Romaine Contraction, is + are combined	70	(5)
Labov Deletion and Straight Deletion of is + are	75	(2)
Implications	77	(10)
Summary	87	(3)
Notes	87	(3)
Ethnicity as a Sociolinguistic Boundary	90	(22)
A Sea Island example: Mrs Queen and Mr King	91	(5)
Black--white speech differences in other studies	96	(4)
In search of explanations	100	(8)
Summary	108	(4)
Notes	108	(4)
Addressee- and Topic-Influenced Style Shift: A Quantitative Sociolinguistic Study	112	(43)
Faye McNair-Knox
Introduction	112	(2)
The study of style in quantitative sociolinguistics	114	(5)
Empirical study of style shift in Foxy's interviews	119	(26)
Summary and conclusion	145	(10)
Notes	148	(7)
Part II Evolution	155	(126)
Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise	157	(17)
Angela E. Rickford
Method	158	(1)
Cut-eye	159	(6)
Suck-teeth	165	(5)
Conclusion	170	(4)
Notes	172	(2)
Social Contact and Linguistic Diffusion: Hiberno English and New World Black English	174	(45)
Introduction	174	(3)
Contact Between Irish and African populations in the New World	177	(12)
Hypotheses about the origin of VBE habitual be	189	(18)
Conclusion	207	(12)
Notes	210	(9)
Copula Variability in Jamaican Creole and African American Vernacular English: A Reanalysis of DeCamp's Texts	219	(14)
Introduction	219	(3)
Holm's (1976, 1984) analysis	222	(1)
My reanalyis	222	(9)
Summary and conclusion	231	(2)
Notes	231	(2)
Prior Creolization of African American Vernacular English? Sociohistorical and Textual Evidence from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries	233	(19)
Introduction	233	(1)
Sociohistorical conditions	234	(15)
Summary and conclusion	249	(3)
Notes	250	(2)
Are Black and White Vernaculars Diverging?	252	(9)
Introduction	252	(1)
Linguistic issues	252	(5)
Social issues	257	(4)
Grammatical Variation and Divergence in Vernacular Black English	261	(20)
Introduction	261	(2)
Invariant habitual be	263	(4)
Zero copula and auxiliary is, are	267	(3)
Absence of attributive possessive -s	270	(1)
Absence of third singular, present tense -s	271	(2)
Absence of plural -s and past tense marking	273	(1)
Conclusion: Interpreting the evidence for divergence and convergence	274	(7)
Notes	277	(4)
Part III Educational Implications	281	(67)
Attitudes towards AAVE, and Classroom Implications and Strategies	283	(7)
Attitudes towards AAVE	283	(1)
Implications for teaching language arts to speakers of AAVE	284	(3)
Classroom strategies and exercises involving social dialects	287	(3)
Notes	288	(2)
Unequal Partnership: Sociolinguistics and the African American Speech Community	290	(30)
Contributions of the African American speech community to (socio) linguistics	291	(6)
Contributions of (socio) linguistics to the African American speech community	297	(13)
What can we do?	310	(10)
Notes	315	(5)
Suite for Ebony and Phonics	320	(9)
What is Ebonics?	320	(3)
Who speaks Ebonics?	323	(1)
How did Ebonics arise?	324	(3)
The Oakland School Board proposal	327	(2)
Using the Vernacular to Teach the Standard	329	(19)
Introduction	329	(1)
How (badly) schools have failed to educate African American students	330	(4)
The relevance of Ebonics	334	(9)
Some Caribbean and European parallels	343	(1)
Summary and conclusion	344	(4)
Notes	345	(3)
References	348	(38)
Index	386