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The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English

An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources

Alexander Kautzsch author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:De Gruyter

Published:30th Jul '02

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English cover

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.

ISBN: 9783110173017

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 675g

350 pages

Reprint 2012