The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English. An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources

• Applicant: Dr. Alexander Kautzsch
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2001 to 2002
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5356106

This project deals with the historical reconstruction of Earlier African American English (AAE) as spoken between the second quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. It provides detailed quantitative analyses of negation patterns, copula usage, and relative marker choice as observed in a variety of sources. Thus, it is one of the first studies that delivers empirical data to account for temporal change, regional diversity, and gender variation in Earlier AAE. A first analytical part studies the features mentioned above in transcribed interviews with elderly African Americans conducted in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1970s. [...] The second analytical part introduces two sets of non-standard letters to the analysis. [...] Apart from the global methodological set-up described above, two methodological principles of this study need to be mentioned which contribute enormously to a maximum of objectivity and reliability of the results obtained. First, the quantitative analyses are each introduced by necessary considerations about the categorization of variables, i e it is shown in great detail which types should be included in as well as excluded from any analysis. Second, wherever possible the quantitative results are tested statistically either by VARBRUL probabilities or by chi-square calculations.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants