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Negation and the history of African American English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2009

Darin M. Howe
Darin M. Howe
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Abstract

This article describes the use of negation in three corpora representative of early to mid-19th century African American English: the Ex-Slave Recordings (Bailey, Maynor, & Cukor-Avila, 1991), the Samaná Corpus (Poplack & Sankoff, 1981), and the African Nova Scotian English Corpus (Poplack & Tagliamonte, 1991). The specific structures studied are the negative form ain't, negative concord to indefinites and to verbs, negative inversion, and negative postposing. It is found that Early African American English (i) is far more conservative than modern African American Vernacular English; (ii) is generally similar to Southern White Nonstandard English; and (iii) displays no distinct Creole behavior. In other words, our study suggests that the negation system of Early African American English derived directly (i.e., without approximation or creolization) from colonial English, contrary to the findings of Rickford (1977, 1995), Labov (1982), Winford (1992), De Bose and Faraclas (1993), DeBose (1994), and others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , July 1997 , pp. 267 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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