Subject Concord of Be in Early Black English
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8727615 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jeutonne P Brewer (corresponding author), Jeutonne Brewer |
| Year | 1973 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 1/2 |
| Pages | 5-5 |
| Publication date | 1973-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Speech (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3087888 |
| OpenAlex | W2320045518 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 1 |
IN SPITE OF recent interest in black English, relatively little is known about its earlier history. William A. Stewart and J. L. Dillard have proposed that black English spoken in this country developed from an earlier plantation creole that was related to pidgins and creoles spoken in areas such as Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Stewart (1967) noted grammatical similarities (for example, the absence of be and the possessive suffix -s) between literary attestations of early black English and West African Pidgin English, Surinam Pidgin, and Gullah. J. L. Dillard (1971) agreed with Stewart's claim of an earlier creole period and related the absence of the copula in present-day black English in Washington, D.C., to that earlier system. Although Labov's (1968, 1969) studies of linguistic variation in present-day black English did not provide supporting evidence for the creole hypothesis, he noted (1969: 719, fn. 5) that forms which do not occur frequently enough to be considered part of the regular linguistic patterns in present-day black English could be significant in reconstructing its history. These studies of black English linguistic history have not only helped to generate interest in the study of black English but have also indicated how much research remains to be done. Intriguing questions remain unanswered or at best only partially answered. If earlier pidgin and creole periods are part of black English linguistic history, to what extent does this distinctive history account for structural differences in present-day black English ? Recent descriptive work has tended to support the claim that present-day black English and standard English are so similar that they have the same underlying structure (Labov et al. 1968). Did the two grammatical systems have different underlying structures at an earlier time ? If so, what was the form of that earlier black English grammar ? In Black English (1972), Dillard attempted to show the development of the dialect during earlier pidgin, creole, and decreolization stages; but his work, which is intended for a general audience, is more suggestive than definitive in regard to the questions raised above. Keith Whinnom (1971) has pointed out that a decreolized language can become a dialectal variant of a standard language; that is, languages with significantly different underlying structures can become very similar to each other. If black English had an earlier creole period, then it could have been
Linguistics · Subject (documents · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · History · Philosophy
Language Variety in the South Revisited
Re-Examining Vernacular Black English
The Origin of American Black English
Re-examining Vernacular Black English
Ideology and facts on African American English
Convergent explanation and alternative regularization patterns
Case Assignment in Simple and Coordinate Constructions in Present-Day English
Case Assignment and the Ordering of Constituents in Coordinate Constructions
The Origin of the Verbal -S in Black English
Revisiting Invariant am in Early African American Vernacular English
| Unique citing works | 10 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,23 |
| Citation span | 1983 - 2022 (40) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |