Doctoral Dissertation Research: Variation and Change in Past Tense Negation in AAVE

新兴的社会句法领域试图揭示说话者的心理语法是如何组织的，以允许语言的变化，以及语言的结构和社会知识之间的关系是什么。本研究将通过对费城非裔美国人英语（AAE）的形态句法变异的观察，探讨语法和变异之间的关系。具体来说，该项目着眼于AAE的一个独特功能的增加，在简单过去时中使用“不是”（说话者否则会使用“没有”）及其对语法其他方面的影响，包括其对使用动词形态作为沟通时体意义的影响。在进行这项研究，以下问题将得到回答：什么是社会和语言的限制使用的'ain 't'在言语社区？在变化的不同阶段，个体说话者对“不是”有什么语言知识？“ain 't”后动词的形态形式在变化过程中，对不同的说话人和不同的时间是如何与时体意义相互作用的？该项目的数据来自两个来源：（1）由社区内部人士在20世纪80年代初在费城收集的60多名非洲裔美国人的日常对话语料库;（2）与费城AAE的母语者的当代启发，以了解时态-体意义和动词形态之间的相互作用。结果将展示的变化的社会和语言概况，以及提供一个句法分析的“不是”在AAE和帐户的变化与“不是”和动词形态的变化后，“不是”。这项研究不仅有助于我们理解形态句法变异以及它如何与说话者互动，语法的心理表征，它还提供了洞察AAE的底层结构，它与其他英语变体的相似之处和不同之处，以及AAE的说话者如何驾驭这些差异。

The emerging field of socio-syntax seeks to uncover how a speaker's mental grammar is organized to allow for variability in language as well as what the relationship between structural and social knowledge about language is. This research project will probe the relationship between grammar and variation through observations of morphosyntactic variation in African American English [AAE] as spoken in Philadelphia. Specifically, the project looks at the increase of a unique feature of AAE, the use of 'ain't' in the simple past (where speakers would otherwise use 'didn't') and its consequences for other aspects of the grammar, including its effect on the use of verbal morphology as a way of communicating tense-aspect meaning. In pursuing this study, the following questions will be answered: What are the social and linguistic constraints on the use of 'ain't' within the speech community? What linguistic knowledge about 'ain't' do individual speakers at different points in the change have? How does the morphological form of verbs following 'ain't' interact with tense-aspect meaning for different speakers and at different times during the change?Data for the project comes from two sources: (1) A corpus of casual conversations with more than 60 African American speakers collected in Philadelphia in the early 1980s by a community insider; and (2) Contemporary elicitation with native speakers of Philadelphia AAE to understand the interaction between tense-aspect meaning and verbal morphology. The results will demonstrate the social and linguistic profile of the change as well as provide a syntactic analysis of 'ain't' in AAE and an account of both variation with 'ain't' and variation in verbal morphology following 'ain't'. This research not only contributes to our understanding of morphosyntactic variation and how it interacts with speakers, mental representations of grammar, it also provides insight into the underlying structure of AAE, how it is similar to and different from other varieties of English, and how speakers of AAE navigate such differences.