Doctoral dissertation Research: Aspect vs. affect in African American Vernacular English

本研究考察了非裔美国人英语中动词-S(-S在现在时动词上的不规范用法)的使用情况。AAE演讲者被要求判断什么时候使用动词-S最合适，并通过评分任务提供关于他们自己使用动词-S的频率、在周围社区使用它的频率以及他们对非裔美国人使用S的社区中谁更有可能使用动词-S的信念的信息。为了收集这些数据，将进行一项调查，让参与者阅读简短的情景，并为每个情景选择一个特定的后续句子是否更适合有或没有动词-S。要调查的因素包括那些过去的研究暗示具有影响力的因素。语法因素包括说话人情感，说话人给话语带来的态度或情感，以及将状态和正在进行的动作与重复动作区分开来的习惯体。非语法因素包括参与者的年龄、性别以及地理区域，这将通过在加州、俄亥俄州、纽约和德克萨斯州四个地点进行调查来进行。因此，这项研究提供了证据，证明了言语-S是否可以以一种以往基于产出的研究难以解释的方式具有情感和/或方面的内涵。它还将提供一个区域视角，这是一段时间以来AAE研究中所缺乏的。大量的参与者和其他社会因素的考虑也将使这项研究具有可靠的结果，是一项有价值的研究。这项研究的结果应该有助于解决人们对非标准变体的误解，特别是非裔美国人的英语。

This study examines the use of verbal -s (the non-standard application of -s on present tense verbs) in African-American English (AAE). AAE speakers are asked to judge when verbal -s is most appropriate, and also to provide information via rating tasks about their beliefs regarding the frequency of their own use of verbal -s, the frequency of its use in their surrounding communities, and their beliefs about who in the African-American AAE-speaking community is more likely to use verbal -s. In order to gather these data, a survey will be carried out in which participants read brief scenarios and choose, for each one, whether a given follow-up sentence presented to them is more appropriate with or without verbal -s. Factors to be investigated include those which past research has hinted at being influential. Grammatical factors include speaker affect, the attitude or emotion that a speaker brings to an utterance, and habitual aspect, which distinguishes states and ongoing actions from repetitive actions. Non-grammatical factors include age and gender of participants, as well as geographical region, which will be investigated by conducting the survey in four locations: California, Ohio, New York, and Texas. This study thus provides evidence as to whether verbal -s can have an affective and/or aspectual connotation in a way that past production-based studies have struggled to account for. It will also provide a regional perspective, which has been lacking in AAE studies for some time. The large number of participants and consideration of other social factors will also make this a valuable study with reliable results. The results of this study should help to address the misperceptions about non-standard varieties in general and African American English in particular.