Shin and Mill (2021) propose four steps children go through when learning "variable form use." Although I applaud Shin and Miller's focus on morphosyntactic variation, their accrual of evidence is post hoc and selective. Fortunately, Shin and Miller recognize this and encourage tests of their ideas. In support of their work, I share data…

Purpose: This research explored mechanisms of vowel variation in African American English by comparing 2 geographically distant groups of African American and White American English speakers for participation in the African American Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift. Method: Thirty-two male (African American: n = 16, White American controls: n =…

Despite a wealth of scholarship documenting its linguistic complexity, students in the United States are rarely encouraged to speak or write in African American Language (AAL) in their primary classrooms. The authors documented how one teacher and his highly diverse second-grade class examined, explored, and experimented with AAL in an…

Code-switching pedagogies do not consider that some features of African American Verbal Tradition (AVT) are rhetorically effective mainstream communication structures in academic writing. My research asserts that when teaching language/ dialect difference in majority white school settings, contrastive analysis techniques such as these may have…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

Explores the distribution of /ai/ monophthongization in African-American and European-American speakers in Memphis, Tennessee. Presents evidence of extensive glide weakening in the African-American community in Memphis and compares it to the degree and contexts of glide weakening in the European-American community. (Author/VWL)

Investigated African American Vernacular English dialect features in the midwestern community of Davenport, Iowa, and compared them to those reported by Pollock and Berni (1997) for Memphis, Tennessee--specifically productions of vocalic and postvocalic /r/ across African-American speakers from Davenport and Memphis. (Author/VWL)

The marking of past temporal reference in Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Trinidadian English is compared. Similarities in the patterns of variation according to verb type and phonological conditioning suggest that past marking in contemporary BEV preserves traces of an earlier shift from a creole pattern to one approximating the Standard…

The extension of the progressive aspect to stative verbs has been identified as a characteristic feature of New Varieties of English across the world, including the English of black South Africans (BSAfE). This paper examines the use of the progressive aspect in BSAfE, by doing a comparative analysis of three corpora of argumentative student…

An analysis of letters written by 19th-century African Americans shows constraints on verbal "-s" marking that parallel those found in the writing of Scotch-Irish immigrants in the same time period and region, specifically a subject type constraint and a proximity to subject constraint. (MDM)

The definition of and distinction between two variations of American English, African American English Vernacular (AAEV) and Gullah, the American creole spoken on the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, are discussed. It is argued that while these and other varieties are defined typically by their basilects, the reality encountered in the field…

It is suggested that the static model of language which is prerequisite for contrastive analysis is inadequate in pinpointing potential difficulties in second language learning. The student learning graphemic-phonetic correspondences encounters two types of difficulties not exposed by contrastive analysis: dialectal difficulties and reading…

The linguistic theory of contrastive analysis, which provides pragmatic insights into the teaching of foreign languages, can be equally successful when applied to the teaching of one dialect of a language to speakers of its other dialects. This paper briefly illustrates how a theoretically constructed hierarchy of difficulty, originally designed…

Essays on English in South Africa and its neighboring countries include: "A History of English in South Africa" (Len Lanham); "English in South African Society: A Preliminary Overview" (Bill Branford); "Black English in South Africa" (David Gough); "Language Contact, Transmission, Shift: South African Indian…

Papers on French linguistics, most in French, address the following topics: micro structural treatment of regionalisms in three French dictionaries; effects of the use of Quebec French on the intelligibility of synthesized speech; reading comprehension as a constructive process; acoustic markers of the utterance in Quebec French; constraints and…