Browsing by Author "Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair"

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"Accomodation Without Assimilation:" Past Tense Unmarking and Peak Accent Alignment in Hispanic English
(2008-08-11) Callahan, Erin Elizabeth; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair; Erik Thomas, Committee Member; Robin Dodsworth, Committee Member
African American Vernacular English in Freshman Composition and the Social Construction of Teacher Response
(2002-07-29) Matarese, Maureen Teresa; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair; Chris M. Anson, Committee Co-Chair; David Herman, Committee Member
Dating from the early 1960's, plentiful scholarship has identified, codified, and analyzed features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the written discourse of students at various educational levels (Wolfram, 1969, 1999; Smitherman 1981; Labov 1972, 1998). Although often ideologically neutral, this scholarship has occasionally sparked heated debates, among linguists and pedagogues alike, about the appropriate educational methods for teaching African American students who bring into their classrooms varieties of English that are popularly thought to deviate from the norms of academic or "standard" English. Moreover, while a growing body of research exists on teacher response to student writing (Anson, 1988) and more recently to the cultural dimensions of response (Cooper and Odell, 1999; Anson, 1999) and the social construction of error in teacher response (Anson 2001), scholarship on teachers' responses to specific, nonstandard linguistic variables in texts is sparse. This study combines a sociolinguistic analysis of AAVE-speaking students' texts with an examination of the nature and underlying ideological origins of specific teacher comments with respect to those features. This thesis analyzes teachers' written responses to AAVE features; including consonant cluster reduction, copula absence, possessive marking, and third person singular –s absence in college students' writing. This analysis of teachers' responses to AAVE in writing allows me to make observations about the ways in which teachers create socially constructed personas for students based on their vernacular dialect features. The results of this study demonstrate that spoken language strongly influences written, although instances of specific vernacular dialect use are highly localized depending on the student, and the range of dialect use varies from one instance of one feature to multiple instances of multiple features. Although the occurrence of AAVE in these essays is sporadic, the teachers' responses to these features illustrate a potential pattern in teacher response technique. Most often, teachers use imperative statements and strikethroughs to correct language in student rough drafts. An initial analysis of this commenting shows that it may not be helpful to students in revising their essays, as most often, the AAVE feature persists in other papers and final drafts that have been "corrected" by the teacher. The thesis concludes with a discussion of further programs of research and implications for educational reform, teacher development, and enhancement in the area of writing and language instruction in multicultural and multidialectal settings. Appendix II provides some potential classroom exercises and approaches that are inspired by the research in the body of this thesis.
Common Irregularity: Comparative Analysis of the Use of Irregular Verb Forms Across Vernacular Dialects
(2007-03-06) Floyd, Jeanne-Marie Nicole; Erik Thomas, Committee Member; Charlotte Gross, Committee Member; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair
While a speech community can draw the attention of linguistic scholars because of a single or small amount of unique dialect features, the occurrence of shared features across many dialects is equally noteworthy. Shared features can generally be tied back to two scenarios: (1) traceable, historical connections that exist between the dialects, or, where no direct connection can be found, (2) a universal process within the language that creates parallel structures. The primary focus of this study is the second of these two scenarios as no direct connection can be made between the dialects examined; knowing the historical development of the parent language is crucial to understanding how dialects that are isolated from each other have come to evolve parallel patterns of behavior. This study examines the behavior of three highly irregular, strong verbs (come, be, and do) across five English dialects (Beech Bottom, NC; Princeville, NC; Robeson County, NC; Abaco, Bahamas; and Tristan da Cunha). Of particular interest is the fact that these three verbs all exhibit the use of the past participle in place of the simple past tense, in the absence of an auxiliary. The dialects examined in this study were chosen for their particularly vernacular qualities, which result in great part from the extreme social, historical, and geographical isolation that has shaped these speech communities. The shared behavior of come, be, and do (the past participles for each and the environments in which each were observed), indicates that like all English verbs, these three have been and continue to undergo movement from strong to weak formations, from a greater variety of inflection and change in the core vowel to greatly reduced inflectional markers within the verbs themselves. Tracking how these three verbs have behaved in Old, Middle, and Modern English (Standard and the five vernacular varieties) reveals not only the historic movement away from an inflected past tense formation with the addition of an auxiliary, but continuing that movement to eliminate even the inflected auxiliary (either completely or reducing it to a cliticized form). The result is a completely weakened past tense form that consists of an orphaned past participle functioning solely as the simple past tense verb form. Auxiliary use as it changed historically is also examined to show how the role of auxiliaries in conjunction with verbs moving toward weak formations has shifted over time to place the burden of inflection almost entirely on the auxiliary rather than the main verb itself. In particular auxiliary do is given as an example as several studies have looked at how usage of this verb has increased over time, both in response to the strong-to-weak movement and as a product of the influence of non-native (L2) English speakers. Have is also given as an example to show how it was historically the auxiliary of choice, especially with be, in support of the current study's data, which shows evidence of deleted have/had. Finally, the example of deletion of the auxiliary within negative sentence constructions, following historical insertion of the negative marker, is provided to show a parallel development in auxiliary insertion followed by deletion. In both the negative constructions and in the auxiliary deletion observed in this study, the environments represent movement toward a highly weakened state in which even the auxiliary (itself a mechanism of weakening) has been removed to continue the overall shift toward weaker constructions.
A Cross Regional Study of Locative to in North Carolina
(2006-05-08) Vadnais, Janelle Chaundre; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair; Agnes Bolonyai, Committee Member; Erik Thomas, Committee Member
This study compares the use of static locative to in the speech of African Americans and European Americans in various regional communities throughout Eastern North Carolina. These communities are located on Roanoke Island, in Hyde County, Harkers Island, Ocracoke Island, Princeville and in Robeson County, North Carolina. Quantitative examination of locative to reveals a marked pattern of ethnolinguistic alignment related to integration patterns. In Hyde County and Roanoke Island, the use of locative to is sharply reduced in the speech of African Americans who first attended integrated schools. However, in Ocracoke, the decreasing use of locative to is gradual across time, marking the role of an active social variable in the divergence of African American speech after integration. By comparing all of these communities, I seek to explain why there is this ethnolinguistic patterning and what social factors have contributed to it. Additionally, I uncover what this language pattern says about the history of race relations on a regional level in North Carolina and what happens to this language feature over time.
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.
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.
"I'm feeksin' to move": Hispanic English in Siler City, North Carolina
(2003-05-07) Moriello, Beckie; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair; Erik Thomas, Committee Member; Agnes Bolonyai, Committee Member
This study is an overview of the emerging dialect of rural Southern Hispanic English. Siler City, North Carolina is the focus. The study examines the turbulent history of race relations in the area (including the February 2000 David Duke rally), and also provides a detailed account of race relations in 2002. The analysis focuses on the speech of 8 to 18-year-olds of Mexican decent of varying lengths of residency in the United States. Most children, even those born in the US, exhibit substantial Spanish transfer. Unglided /aI/ is used as an indicator of any local dialect (White or Black). Various speakers' /aI/ glides are measured, plotted, and juxtaposed with speakers' orientation toward the local culture. As corroborated by the non-Southern production of /aI/ among the majority of speakers, most Hispanics in Siler City are by and large not interacting with local Whites and Blacks more than absolutely necessary. There are a couple of notable exceptions, however, which are discussed in detail.
The Lost Community of the Outer Banks: African American Speech on Roanoke Island
(2004-03-24) Carpenter, Jeannine Lynn; Erik R. Thomas, Committee Member; David Herman, Committee Member; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair
The regional accommodation of earlier and contemporary African American speech remains one of the major issues in the debate over the development of African American English (AAE). Recent studies of African American speech in isolated rural communities (e.g. Wolfram and Thomas 2002; Mallinson and Childs 2003) suggest that the accommodation of regional dialect norms by African American speakers coexisted with a common core of distinct ethnolinguistic traits in earlier African American English. Regionality and local dialect accommodation thus have taken on increased significance in the examination of the development of AAE. The present study considers a different but analogous regional situation with respect to African American speech—Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Roanoke Island is well known as the site of the Lost Colony, where the first settlement of British colonists disappeared in 1587. The untold story of Roanoke Island, however, is its role in the development of Outer Banks African American speech. Many of the approximately 200 current African American residents of Roanoke Island can trace their ancestry back to a Freedmen's Colony of over 3,000 African Americans established on the island during the Civil War. Following the forced disbanding of the Freedmen's Colony at the end of the Civil War, the African American population of Roanoke Island was reduced to approximately 300 residents. Now, in the face of an increasing, permanent white population (approximately 2,000) and thousands of tourists who inundate the island during the summer season, the African American community maintains strong intra-ethnic solidarity. The 30 participants in this study were chosen using community social networks and the family-tree social network model in which different members of extended families are selected for interviewing. In addition to these tape-recorded sociolinguistic interviews, data from a series of oral history interviews with members of the only all-black lifesaving crew on the Outer Banks allow the analysis to include four generations of speakers. The quantitative analysis of both traditional Outer Banks regional features (e.g. past tense be leveling to weren't, static locative to for at) and core diagnostic structures of AAVE (e.g. copula absence, third person singular —s absence, prevocalic consonant cluster reduction) allow us to determine patterns of local and supra-regional alignment over time. The generational analysis indicates a pattern of increasingly regional accommodation with respect to phonological features (e.g. postvocalic rhoticity) rather than a movement toward the supra-regional AAE norm found in Wolfram and Thomas (2002). However, the analysis of morphosyntactic features (e.g. prevocalic consonant cluster reduction) indicates an increasing alignment with AAE across the generations. Also of interest, the first generation to attend integrated schools shows heightened percentages of AAE morphosyntactic features when compared to the other generations. As we shall see in the ensuing analysis, the generational patterns revealed in this study depict differences and similarities in the AAE spoken on Roanoke Island over apparent time. However, significant levels of individual variation in each generation will also be attested, challenging generalizations about consistent changes over time. The mixed dialect alignment among Roanoke Island African Americans supports the conclusion that regional speech patterns can serve an important role in the development of different varieties of AAE. Furthermore, the unique configuration of dialect features on Roanoke Island as compared to other isolated rural settings indicates alternative trajectories of change in different regional settings, influenced by such factors as population size as well as local and extended inter-ethnic contact situation.
Re-examining Dialect Recession in Ocracoke Island
(2007-04-26) D'Andrea, Kristina Marie; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair
Though dialect recession in small, historically insular communities has now been the focus of a number of variation studies, there are few studies that scrutinize this process in real time. Ocracoke Island, located in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, presents an ideal situation for this study as tourists and new residents continue to flood the island that is still called home by 300 to 400 ancestral islanders among its 700 to 800 permanent residents. Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted on the island by the North Carolina Language and Life Project (NCLLP) in the early 1990s, almost 15 years ago, and since that time the NCLLP's presence on the island has remained constant. In recent years (2005-present), a follow-up study to that conducted in 1993-1995 has been launched in order to assess how quickly the language of Ocracoke really is receding, and what, if any, effects the NCLLP's presence has had on the dialect. This thesis examines both qualitative and quantitative data collected from almost 70 interviews. In an analysis of discourse between Ocracoke middle schoolers, certain ideologies about Ocracoke in-group identity are discovered as well as struggles in maintaining the image of "color-blindness" in conversations about the recent Hispanic presence on the island. Additionally, two morphosyntactic and one phonological feature typical of the Brogue dialect are analyzed. Past tense remorphologization of the negative forms of be, as in I weren't or she weren't, and the use of the static locative to in place of prepositional lexical items such as at, as in he's to the dock, are both common morphosyntactic features found along the Outer Banks and especially in Ocracoke (Schilling-Estes & Wolfram 1994; Wolfram, Hazen, & Schilling-Estes 1999; Vadnais 2006). Also, the relative backing of the nucleus of the glide ⁄ai⁄ in relation to ⁄⁄ production, creating such productions as hoi toid, is a salient and commonly referenced variation of this particular region (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 1995; Craig 1994). While all three of these features are decreasing in relative usage, the distribution among different age and social groups leads to the usage differentiations analyzed in this thesis. Local groups, including the "Poker Game Network" (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 1995, 1997; Wolfram, Hazen, & Schilling-Estes 1999) and the "Pelican Network" (identified in this thesis) help to clarify the definition of a "traditional" Ocracoke male. However, participating in such networks may not singularly correlate with the preservation of traditional island norms. Certain families and individuals seem to be the inspiration for the vision most islanders consider a true O'cocker, as they're called.
What's Beef: Discourse Practices of Battling in Hip Hop Language
(2005-07-31) Fitzpatrick, James Michael; Walt Wolfram, Committee Chair; David Herman, Committee Member; Agnes Bolonyai, Committee Member
Over the past quarter century, hip hop has become a mainstream cultural force in the United States and worldwide. In particular, the language of hip hop culture is amenable to study from many different theoretical angles and diverse fields. This study explores some discourse-level features of hip hop language and the sociological phenomena which have given rise to these features. My analysis focuses specifically on 'battling,' a highly competitive subtype of hip hop discourse in which participants engage in 'freestyling' — the creation of extemporaneous, rhymed discourse for the purpose of bolstering their own social standing or attacking that of their opponents. An analysis of battling provides many insights into the social and ideological underpinnings of hip hop culture. I examine the lyrics of several battle songs to demonstrate the prevalence of sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic language in hip hop songs. In hip hop culture, social capital is largely linked to the extent to which a speaker espouses heterosexual masculine values. I argue that while sexist and homophobic language retards hip hop's ability to be fully accepted into mainstream culture, it is indicative of a larger social trend — namely, that African Americans, who constitute the large majority of users of hip hop language, have been denied access to traditional markers of social status, such as higher education and financial prosperity. Like many vernacular language varieties, hip hop language has been dismissed as 'slang' or 'bad English.' However, it is an extremely significant identity marker for its practitioners, and despite certain features which may seem sexist or homophobic, hip hop language as a whole brings to light some larger sociological problems such as racism, and as such, hip hop culture has an enormous potential as a catalyst for positive social change.