Understanding variation in African American Language: Corpus and prosodic fieldwork perspectives

非裔美国人语言(African American Language，AAL)是一个用来描述许多非裔美国人(但不是所有非裔美国人)和一些非非洲裔美国人所说的一系列语言变体的术语，其句法、语音、语义、语用和词汇模式与普通美国英语的结构交织在一起。韵律是语法的一部分，涉及与重音和旋律有关的言语方面，是AAL中系统研究最少的语言成分之一。韵律与AAL语法的其他部分之间的接口还没有被很好地理解。这个项目响应了扩展语言分析和工具以更好地理解AAL及其不同变体中工作的韵律系统的重要需求。该项目将开创包容性工具和方法，能够接触到广泛的AAL使用者和社区，结合基于社区的韵律实地工作和基于网络的大规模语料库分析。田野作业地点包括美国南部一个小镇的孤立同质社区和美国北部小城市的异质社区。该项目采用标准使用的韵律田野作业启发式任务来分析韵律界面与语言产生和理解中的语义、句法和语篇语境。将结合心理语言学方法来丰富任务，解释说话者内部和不同说话者之间的差异。现场和大规模基于网络的生产和理解研究的实验设计也将受到数据驱动的计算模式发现的启发，即韵律AAL结构是如何在Twitter上以书面形式传达的。2022年美国语言学会(LSA)暑期学院将提供基于赠款数据的研讨会和课程，该项目包括为代表不足的群体的学生提供其他培训和教育机会。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

African American Language (AAL), a term used to capture a range of linguistic varieties spoken by many, but not all African Americans, and some non-African Americans, has syntactic, phonological, semantic, pragmatic, and lexical patterns intertwined with structures of General American English. Prosody, a part of the grammar dealing with the aspects of speech related to stress and melody, is one of the least systematically studied linguistic components of AAL. The interface of prosody with other parts of the AAL grammar is not well-understood. This project responds to an important need to extend linguistic analyses and tools to better understand the prosodic systems at work in AAL and its different varieties.The project will pioneer inclusive tools and methods capable of reaching a wide range of AAL speakers and communities, combining community-based prosodic fieldwork and large-scale, web-based corpus analysis. Fieldwork sites include an isolated homogenous community in a small town in the Southern U.S., and a heterogenous community in the small city in the Northern U.S. The project adapts standardly-used prosodic fieldwork elicitation tasks to analyze prosodic interfaces with semantics, syntax, and discourse context in language production and comprehension. Psycholinguistic methods to enrich the tasks to explain variation within and across speakers will be incorporated. Experimental design for field- and large-scale web-based production and comprehension studies will also be informed by data-driven computational pattern discovery of how prosodic AAL structures are conveyed on Twitter in written form. Workshops and courses based on data from the grant will be offered at the 2022 Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Summer Institute and the project includes other training and educational opportunities for students from under-represented groups.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.