MRPG: Syntactic and Semantic Patterns in Child African American English

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Adolescent and adult African American English (AAE) is characterized by well-defined syntactic and semantic forms. However, the stages of development in which child AAE speakers acquire these patterns have not been identified. As a result, thorough descriptions of the speech of normally developing AAE speakers are not available, though some researchers have considered the use of a particular feature in the language of five and six year old AAE speakers (Stockman and Vaughn-Cook 1981; Wyatt 1991, 1995; Jackson 1995). The planning activities are designed to lead to the development of a protocol, including elicitation tasks, that will be used in gathering information to write a descriptive analysis of the syntactic and semantic patterns in the grammars of three, four and five year old AAE speakers in Lake Arthur, Louisiana; Austin, Texas; and Dallas, Texas. The research to be conducted following the planning activities will provide data about the overall system of AAE, with a focus on areas such as tense and aspect marking, the system of existential marking, patterns in negation constructions and strategies of question formation. By analyzing AAE within a theoretical framework, it becomes possible to move beyond discussions in which the variety is compared to mainstream English, thus showing how AAE patterns with respect to other languages.