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

新兴的社会语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，以及关于语言的结构知识和社会知识之间的关系是什么。本研究项目将通过观察在费城使用的非裔美国人英语[AAE]的形态句法变化来探讨语法与变化之间的关系。具体来说，该项目着眼于AAE的一个独特特征的增加，即在一般过去时中使用“ain't”（否则说话者会使用“didn't”）及其对语法其他方面的影响，包括它对作为交流时态意义方式的言语形态的影响。在进行这项研究时，将回答以下问题：在言语社区中，使用‘ain’t'的社会和语言限制是什么？在变化的不同阶段，不同的说话者对‘ain’t'有什么语言知识？在不同的说话者和不同的时间，ain't后面的动词的形态形式是如何与时态意义相互作用的？该项目的数据来自两个来源：(1)20世纪80年代初，一位社区内部人士在费城收集了60多名非洲裔美国人的随意对话语料库；(2)与费城AAE的母语人士进行当代启发，以了解时态意义与言语形态之间的相互作用。研究结果将展示这一变化的社会和语言特征，并提供“ain't”在AAE中的句法分析，以及“ain't”的变化和“ain't”之后的词法变化。这项研究不仅有助于我们理解形态句法变化及其与说话者的相互作用，语法的心理表征，还有助于我们深入了解AAE的潜在结构，它与其他英语变体的相似和不同之处，以及AAE的说话者如何应对这些差异。

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.