Doctoral dissertation Research: Aspect vs. affect in African American Vernacular English

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

This study examines the use of verbal -s (the non-standard application of -s on present tense verbs) in African-American English (AAE). AAE speakers are asked to judge when verbal -s is most appropriate, and also to provide information via rating tasks about their beliefs regarding the frequency of their own use of verbal -s, the frequency of its use in their surrounding communities, and their beliefs about who in the African-American AAE-speaking community is more likely to use verbal -s. In order to gather these data, a survey will be carried out in which participants read brief scenarios and choose, for each one, whether a given follow-up sentence presented to them is more appropriate with or without verbal -s. Factors to be investigated include those which past research has hinted at being influential. Grammatical factors include speaker affect, the attitude or emotion that a speaker brings to an utterance, and habitual aspect, which distinguishes states and ongoing actions from repetitive actions. Non-grammatical factors include age and gender of participants, as well as geographical region, which will be investigated by conducting the survey in four locations: California, Ohio, New York, and Texas. This study thus provides evidence as to whether verbal -s can have an affective and/or aspectual connotation in a way that past production-based studies have struggled to account for. It will also provide a regional perspective, which has been lacking in AAE studies for some time. The large number of participants and consideration of other social factors will also make this a valuable study with reliable results. The results of this study should help to address the misperceptions about non-standard varieties in general and African American English in particular.