The dative alternation in African American English: Researching syntactic variation and change across sociolinguistic datasets

Abstract

Recent research has shown the dative alternation in English to be a productive arena for examining the relationship between group-level variation and the internalization of individuals' grammars. Experimental methods (e.g., Bresnan and Ford, Language 86: 168–213, 2010) and the analysis of large published corpora (e.g., Bresnan et al., Predicting the dative alternation, Amsterdam, 2007) have revealed subtle cross-dialect differences for this variable. The current paper seeks to improve our understanding of this feature and its bearings on experience-based models of grammar by examining African American English (AAE) data from sociolinguistic interviews and from historical letters written by semi-literate ex-slaves. We also consider some methodological problems of conducting corpus-like analyses on non-standard varieties.