Browsing by Author "Michael Adams, Committee Member"

Filter results by typing the first few letters
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    The Development of African American English in the Oldest Black Town in America: Plural -s Absence in Princeville, North Carolina.
    (2005-05-02) Rowe, Ryan; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair; Erik Thomas, Committee Member; Michael Adams, Committee Member
    The Anglicist/Creolist debate concerning the history and structure of English within the African Diaspora has been updated in recent years. New evidence from Early African American English (EAAE) was found by Poplack, Tagliamonte and Eze (2000) to indicate that all of the features of African American English (AAE) derive from earlier varieties of English. More recently, Rickford (2004) found contradictory evidence from a reanalysis of the Poplack et al. corpora compared to a wider range of pidgin and creole languages. From the research to date, there is only comparable quantitative data from EAAE and African pidgins and creoles for three common variables—copula contraction/absence, past tense marking, and zero plural marking (or plural —s absence). Of the communities considered in this debate, there has been no evidence presented from an extensive study of plural —s absence (e.g. Lots of dog_) within a long-standing African American enclave in the United States. This paper attempts to contribute to the scope of the evidence for the origins and development of English in the African Diaspora by analyzing plural —s absence as found across three generations of the oldest known, self-governed, African American town in the United States. Princeville, North Carolina, was settled in 1865 by freed slaves who gathered on an unwanted flood plain along the Tar River. In 1885, this predominantly African American town, which now has a population of just over 2,000, became the first municipality incorporated by African Americans in the United States. Throughout its history, Princeville has endured racial intimidation, economic and social isolation, and repeated flooding, but it has steadfastly persisted as a cohesive, monoethnic community. Based on sociolinguistic interviews conducted with 35 life-long Princeville residents, this study analyzes the relative frequencies and internal conditioning factors on plural —s absence in Princeville speech over three generations. The data indicate a substantial presence of plural —s absence that is higher than those found in contemporary AAE and appears to be dissipating among the younger generation of Princevillians. While differences in approaches to the analysis of the internal conditioning of this feature reflect those of the overall AAE origins debate, this comparative analysis reveals patterns similar to those found in many early AAE varieties and evidence of the role of previously uncompared factors, such as nasal conditioning, that can be used to support and dispute both the Anglicist and Creolist hypotheses. Moreover, what also emerges from this analysis is the substantial influence of locally specific, intra-communal social conditioning of Princeville plural —s absence and the importance of considering the diversity of history and identity within each African American community in attempting to understand the development of AAE.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Feature Erosion and Ethnographic Alignment: The Case of Bertie County, North Carolina
    (2006-05-08) Bowers, Angus Wayne Jr.; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair; Erik R. Thomas, Committee Member; Michael Adams, Committee Member
    Recent sociolinguistic investigations of African American communities in rural North Carolina have indicated that social history, regional location, community size, and relative insularity play major roles in determining the past and present state of ethnolinguistic alignment. This investigation reconsiders the relative effect of these and other variables by investigating ethnolinguistic alignment in Bertie County, North Carolina, a Coastal Plain rural context that is quite unlike the Appalachian and Outer Banks regional contexts that have served as the primary bases for recent hypotheses about trajectories of change in African American English. Bertie County, located at the junction of three distinct dialect areas: Coastal Plain dialect, Outer Banks dialect and Virginia Piedmont, exemplifies a transitional zone in terms of these adjacent dialect areas. How has this variety accommodated its regional contact varieties and negotiated its ethnolinguistic status in this unique, intermediary dialect situation, and what are its implications for sociolinguistic models of dialect contact, change, and ethnic alignment? Originally the home of the Tuscarora Native American Indians, Bertie County was transformed by colonization in the early 1700s into a European settlement characterized by the plantation system of farming (cotton and tobacco) prototypically representative of the American South and almost identical to neighboring Virginia—through which the founders of Bertie County passed. During the colonial and antebellum periods, Bertie exhibited economic success due to its dependence on the system of slavery, but the post-Civil War period has witnessed a continued economic downturn, with two-thirds of the rural County residents now African Americans who still do not share equitability in the County's resources and wealth. In addition, Bertie's regional affiliation—historically linked to Virginia and the coastal areas of North Carolina—has shifted toward a more broadly based North Carolina economy over the past century. How has this post-insular shift of association in a transitional dialect zone influenced the regional dialect in general and its ethnolinguistic alignment in particular? To examine these issues, I examine a set of diagnostic regional and⁄or ethnic phonological and lexical variables for African American and European American speakers of different generations to show how these groups have aligned and distinguished themselves in apparent time. Data gathered through sociolinguistic interviews indicate a pattern of change in which the groups were more regionally aligned in the past, but currently are following a path of divergence. This divergence underscores variation in social alliance as well as speech in that European-American speakers exhibit closer affiliation with the Coastal Plain dialect area whereas African-American speakers are electing to follow more general, urban-based AAVE trends at the expense of local dialect features. The durability of the majority African American core population, the continuing social disparity, and the growing awareness of language as an ethnic marker are all implicated in understanding the current progression of change and variation.