On the Syntax of Written Black English

The writing of black, elementary school children in the Watts District of Los Angeles was analyzed in an effort to relate it to current studies in oral language and to current pedagogical materials. The themes were first segmented by Kellogg Hunt's T-unit concept, with the T-units then analyzed according to the PS grammar used in the school, though some modifications were made in the model to include previously identified Black English features and recent advances in linguistic theory. This information was placed in a computer and frequency counts for over 15,000 sentence constructions were run. Black students were shown to write in patterned and rule-governed ways. Their syntactic forms were lengthy and complicated generally, with almost half of the sentence constructions embedded or conjoined within T-units. Embedding within T-units is almost four times as common as conjoining within T-units. The basic sentence categories were those of the pedagogical model, though some types, like the indirect object patterns, occurred infrequently. Auxiliary patterns did not include all White English forms, but did include all generally identified Black English auxiliaries as well as one pattern mentioned only in the writings of the Creolists. Noun phrase constituency rules also were noticeably different from the pedagogical model

Linguistics · Syntax · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology

• One dress, two dress

  Open Access•L Quentin Dixon, Jing Zhao et al.•System•2012

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