The historical evolution of earlier African American English : an empirical comparison of early sources
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The historical evolution of earlier African American English : an empirical comparison of early sources
（Topics in English linguistics / editor, Herman Wekker, 38）
Mouton de Gruyter, 2002
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Note
Enlargement of author's thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Regensburg, German
Bibliography: p. [311]-327
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Based on a 500,000 word corpus of early sources collected from ex-slave narratives, ex-slave recordings, and interviews with hoodoo priests, this book reconstructs the English spoken by African Americans between 1830 and 1920. By means of detailed quantitative analyses, three linguistic features (negation patterns, copula usage, and relative marker choice) are interpreted along the lines of temporal change, regional diversity, and variation across gender. Additionally, some 300 non-standard letters written by African Americans in the 19th century are compared to the main corpus in order to identify differences between speech and writing.
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