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

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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.