Negation and the history of African American English

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.

The ain't constraint: Not-contraction in early African American English

“…Early AAE differs from other varieties in its preference for ain't with be over have (cf., Cheshire, 1991). This study differs from others (Howe, 1997;Howe & Walker, 2000;Weldon, 1994) in the finding that ain't is favored with nonstative verbs, though this difference may reflect different definitions of stativity. Nevertheless, in this study the effect of stativity is parallel between notcontraction and ain't.…”

“…In light of its alternation with a wider array of auxiliaries than is found in other varieties of English and its apparently indiscriminate occurrence across temporal and aspectual contexts (DeBose & Faraclas, 1993:370;cf., Mufwene, 1993:100, for Gullah), DeBose (1994 argued that ain't in AAE is a monomorphemic negation marker, analogous to that found in EBCs (e.g., Bickerton, 1975;Winford, 1998:108). However, studies of AAE have provided quantitative evidence against the hypothesis that ain't is the relic of a prior creole system (Brewer, 1974;Ewers, 1996:231-232;Howe, 1997;Howe & Walker, 2000;Schneider, 1989;Weldon, 1994;). In contrast with DeBose's (1994) claim, these studies all show that ain't is basically restricted to negating have and be and occurs largely in the present tense, just as in nonstandard varieties of English.…”

“…In this analysis I focus on considerations of stativity, that is, whether the verb describes a state or an event. Following Howe (1997;Howe & Walker, 2000), I assume that auxiliaries take on the stativity of the main verb and that copular be is inherently stative. However, there are various and often conflicting criteria that have been proposed for classifying verbs as stative or nonstative (e.g., Mufwene, 1984:2;Scheffer, 1975:61-64;Winford, 1992), which makes it difficult to code this factor in an objective and replicable manner.…”

Gullah Negation: A Variable Analysis

“…According to Winford (1992b, 350), negation is one of the "chief areas in which BEV [Black English Vernacular] shows traces of american speech 82.4 (2007) 342 its creole origin" (see also Rickford 1977;Labov 1982;Debose and Faraclas 1993;Debose 1994). By contrast, Walker (2005, 13) contends that "the negation system of Early AAE is basically that of nonstandard English" (see also Howe 1997;Howe and Walker 1999;Kautzsch 2000Kautzsch , 2002. Central to this debate has been the question of whether ain't in AAE functions as a tense/ aspect neutral monomorphemic negator, similar to those found in creole varieties, as argued by Debose (1994) and Debose and Faraclas (1993), or whether it functions as a negated auxiliary, similar to those found in white nonstandard varieties of English (WNSE).…”

“…In a comprehensive examination of variable negation patterns in modern-day AAE (Weldon 1994), I argue in favor of the latter but suggest that the alternation between ain't and didn't in AAE likely represents traces of a creole origin, given that this use of ain't is not found productively in modern-day WNSE. However, researchers examining negation patterns in so-called "early" varieties of AAE (see, e.g., Howe 1997;Howe and Walker 1999;Kautzsch 2000Kautzsch , 2002Walker 2005) 2 report "a virtual lack of alternation between didn't and ain't," and describe the prominence of this variable in contemporary varieties as "a recent and spectacular development" (Howe 1997, 284).…”