Liberian Letters and Virginian Narratives: Negation Patterns in Two New Sources of Earlier African American English

Kautzsch, Alexander

doi:10.1215/00031283-75-1-34

Cited by 13 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…In trying to resolve this question, researchers have sought information on the diachronic status of AAVE from two kinds of sources: historical attestations, and synchronic transplanted varieties. The most important diachronic attestations are recordings made with former slaves (Bailey et al 1991) and transcripts of interviews with former slaves from Virginia (Kautzsch 2000) and from across the American South more generally (Schneider 1989). Speakers in these corpora relay African American English as they learned it in the middle of the nineteenth century.…”

Section: Aavementioning

confidence: 99%

“…By contrast, calculated a rate of only 80% for the same corpus (see Table 9). Furthermore, in his study of the Virginian narratives Kautzsch (2000) calculated only the use of 'no' forms (no one, nobody, nothing, etc.) relative to 'any' forms (anyone, anybody, anything, etc.).…”

Section: Negative Concord To Indefinites and Negative Postposingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(32). The Ex-slave Recordings African and the Nova Scotian English data each include four unambiguous cases of negative inversion, while none occur in the Samaná English or the Virginian narratives (Kautzsch 2000). Negative inversion is apparently more frequent in the ex-slave narratives, since Schneider (1989:195) The following two examples show that an expletive (there) can accompany negative inversion; this lends further support to the above-mentioned claim (Sells et al 1996) that the thematic subject remains in situ in this construction.…”

Section: Negative Concord To Indefinites and Negative Postposingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Negation in African American Vernacular English

Howe¹

2005

Aspects of English Negation

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Section: Aavementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Negative Concord To Indefinites and Negative Postposingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Negative Concord To Indefinites and Negative Postposingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Negation in African American Vernacular English

Howe¹

2005

Aspects of English Negation

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“…A clergyman in Virginia similarly reported a short time later that "The planters and even the native Negroes generally talk good English without idiom or tone" (Jones [1724], 1956, p. 80, cited in Feagin, 1997 It is equally clear from the ex-slave narratives and 19th century archival sources (e.g. Krautzsch, 2000), as well as from modern speech (Wolfram & Beckett, 2000), that not all African Americans were similarly sociolinguistically situated.…”

Section: Style-shifting/code-switching In the Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The earliest Gullah/aave texts

Troike

2003

JPCL

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comments and the full text of the stories). 2 The Story-Teller was evidently a genuine "man of words" (Abrahams, 1983), a true raconteur who could artistically embellish a simple traditional account (perhaps further embellished by the transcriber) in a variety of ways. That he commanded a certain range of Gullah is evident from particular signature features in the texts, but the absence of other typical Gullah features and 1 I am grateful to Hyeson Park for assistance in the initial research for this paper. I especially wish to thank Minjoo Kim for examining the Scudder papers in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. I should like to thank Michael Montgomery and one anonymous reviewer for reading the first draft and making helpful comments. A second anonymous reviewer also read the first and revised drafts.2 Five additional tales were published the following year in the magazine (Vol. 3, March, 1869: 116-118), with no further editorial comment, and a final story attributed to a different speaker the next year (Vol. IV, April, 1870: 163). These will not be discussed here, but will form the subject of another paper. No further information is given about the speaker from whom the stories were elicited, nor is the identity of the transcriber actually revealed, but it seems most likely to have been Horace Scudder, as editor of the magazine, since the stories are not credited to any other source; however, no corroborating evidence was found in the Scudder papers. It would be difficult to imagine, as suggested by the second anonymous reviewer, that the stories could have been literary inventions by Scudder. All are well-attested in later independent versions, and there were no previously published versions to serve as sources.

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“…According to Winford (1992b, 350), negation is one of the "chief areas in which BEV [Black English Vernacular] shows traces of american speech 82.4 (2007) 342 its creole origin" (see also Rickford 1977;Labov 1982;Debose and Faraclas 1993;Debose 1994). By contrast, Walker (2005, 13) contends that "the negation system of Early AAE is basically that of nonstandard English" (see also Howe 1997;Howe and Walker 1999;Kautzsch 2000Kautzsch , 2002. Central to this debate has been the question of whether ain't in AAE functions as a tense/ aspect neutral monomorphemic negator, similar to those found in creole varieties, as argued by Debose (1994) and Debose and Faraclas (1993), or whether it functions as a negated auxiliary, similar to those found in white nonstandard varieties of English (WNSE).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Gullah Negation: A Variable Analysis

Weldon¹

2007

American Speech

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This article provides a variable analysis of negation in Gullah and considers the implications of the observed patterns of variability for the debate over the history and development of African American English (AAE). For many years now, linguists have debated over the possibility of an AAE-creole connection and have hypothesized in particular about the putative role of Gullah (or a Gullah-like creole) on the origins and development of AAE. In recent years, negation has become a central topic in this debate, with examinations of variable negation in both early and contemporary varieties of AAE. However, practically no analysis has been done on the system of variable negation in Gullah. This study aims to fill this gap in the literature by providing a quantitative analysis of variable negation in both copula and noncopula constructions in Gullah. While no definitive claims are made about the AAE-Gullah connection based on this analysis, certain patterns in the data, such as the alternation between ain't and didn't in past contexts, allow for the possibility of a historical connection between the two varieties. Debate over the origins and development of African American English(AAE) has been well documented in the linguistic literature, with competing theories dating back to the mid-1900s. Gullah has played at least a nominal role in this debate from very early on, as creolists have hypothesized about a possible AAE-Gullah connection either via decreolization from Gullah (or a Gullah-like creole) to AAE (see, e.g., ) or through processes of language shift or contact between speakers of these respective varieties (see, e.g., Rickford 1997; Winford 1998). Others have argued against a creole origin for AAE or have emphasized the influence of English or other sources on its origins and development (see, e.g.

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Liberian Letters and Virginian Narratives: Negation Patterns in Two New Sources of Earlier African American English

Cited by 13 publications

References 15 publications

Negation in African American Vernacular English

Negation in African American Vernacular English

The earliest Gullah/aave texts

Gullah Negation: A Variable Analysis

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