This article, which examines the system of relative markers in Early African American English as documented in the Ex-Slave Recordings , is intended as a contribution to two areas of research: African American Vernacular English and the system of relativization in English. We found a significantly higher incidence of zero marking in adverbial relatives than in non-adverbial relatives. Among non-adverbial relatives, a variable rule analysis showed that non-humanness of the head as well as the function of the head as subject complement or subject in an existential sentence strongly favored zero relatives, and that prepositional complement heads disfavored zeroes. The lack of w/i-relatives aswell as the frequency of zero subject relatives is interpreted as evidence that African American Vernacular English is a dialect of English.In this article, our aim is twofold: we wish to make a contribution to the study of relativization processes in English, and we wish to throw light on the relativization system in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which has been given little serious attention in earlier work. Although there is by now a vast literature on both relativization processes in English and on AAVE, the intersection of the two sets of research is limited.The system of relativization in English offers rich possibilities of synchronic variation between different forms, as in the man who/whom/that/0 I love or the car that/which/0 I bought. The factors governing the choice of different forms have been the object of many studies (e.g., Ball, 1996;Guy &Bayley, 1995;Olofsson, 1981;Quirk, 1957; Tottiei 1995), but many parameters still remain to be elucidated, such as the influence of regional dialects, medium (speech vs. writing), register, literacy, and prescriptivism, as well as sociolinguistic factors (only social class seems to have been investigated so far; see Adamson, 1992). The use of zero relatives and the adverbial function of relative markers are two neglected problem areas to which we wish to give special attention in this study; we also devote some attention to the role of literacy in relative marker usage and discuss the influence of gender.We are deeply grateful to Guy Bailey for giving us access to the tapes on which the Bailey et al. (1991) transcripts are based. We also thank Edgar Schneider and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and criticisms; the article has benefited greatly from their careful reading. We alone are responsible for any remaining inadvertencies.
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