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book: The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English
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The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English

An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources
  • Alexander Kautzsch
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2002
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About this book

Based on a 500,000 word corpus of early sources collected from ex-slave narratives, ex-slave recordings, and interviews with hoodoo priests, this book reconstructs the English spoken by African Americans between 1830 and 1920. By means of detailed quantitative analyses, three linguistic features (negation patterns, copula usage, and relative marker choice) are interpreted along the lines of temporal change, regional diversity, and variation across gender. Additionally, some 300 non-standard letters written by African Americans in the 19th century are compared to the main corpus in order to identify differences between speech and writing.

Author / Editor information

Alexander Kautzsch is lecturer at the University of Regensburg, Germany.


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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
May 2, 2012
eBook ISBN:
9783110907971
Hardcover published on:
July 30, 2002
Hardcover ISBN:
9783110173017
Edition:
Reprint 2012
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
15
Main content:
335
Other:
Ill.
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