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Variation and Change in Past Tense Negation in African American English

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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Variation And Change In Past Tense Negation In African American English Sabriya Fisher University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Fisher, Sabriya, "Variation And Change In Past Tense Negation In African American English" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2925. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2925 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2925 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Variation And Change In Past Tense Negation In African American English Abstract This dissertation investigates the use of ain’t for negation in past tense contexts in Philadelphia African American English [PhAAE]. This use of ain’t, which varies with didn’t, is a unique feature of AAE (Labov et al. 1968) and has implications for the expression of tense/aspect in the language. First, it further levels tense/aspect cues from auxiliaries in negative contexts. Second, whereas verbal complements of didn’t are uninflected (1a), complements of ain’t may either be uninflected or in preterit form (1b). This asymmetry indicates potential structural differences between ain’t and didn’t. (1) a. They didn’t play yesterday. b. They ain’t play(ed) yesterday. Consequently, this dissertation joins a quantitative study of the social and linguistic factors conditioning use of ain’t with a distributional investigation of its syntax and interaction with tense morphology. Toward that end, I analyze naturalistic speech data from 42 speakers in a corpus of casual conversations collected in the early 1980s from African American Philadelphians. First, analysis of social conditioning on variation between ain’t and didn’t reveals that the use of ain’t in this context is a recent innovation tied to the social setting of urban Northern cities like Philadelphia. Second, an investigation of following verbal morphology indicates that the construction ain’t+base is preferred to ain’t+preterit (used only 25% of the time). Apparent time analysis reveals that ain’t+preterit is preferred by older speakers, suggesting that it may be an older construction. In combination with an analysis of linguistic conditioning on use of ain’t, specifically verbal stativy, I argue that past tense ain’t was reanalyzed from present perfect ain’t, which varies with haven’t and has the same form (2). (2) They ain’t played since Monday. “They haven’t played since Monday.” Based on these results as well as an examination of past vs. perfect constructions and associated verbal forms in PhAAE, I consider the hypothesis that inflection is generated in a functional head lower than tense in ain’t+preterit constructions. Consequently, this dissertation demonstrates a difference in structure between ain’t and didn’t sentences and a distinction in the grammar of AAE compared to other varieties of English. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Linguistics First Advisor William Labov Keywords African American English, Morphosyntax, Sociolinguistics, Tense and Aspect Subject Categories Linguistics This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2925 VARIATION AND CHANGE IN PAST TENSE NEGATION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH Sabriya I. Fisher A DISSERTATION in Linguistics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Supervisor of Dissertation ________________________ William Labov, Professor of Linguistics Graduate Group Chairperson _________________________ Eugene Buckley, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Dissertation Committee: David Embick, Professor of Linguistics Gillian Sankoff, Professor of Linguistics Meredith Tamminga, Assistant Professor of Linguistics VARIATION AND CHANGE IN PAST TENSE NEGATION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH COPYRIGHT 2018 Sabriya I. Fisher This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ For Susie Chestnut. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Looking back over my seven years at Penn, I’m overwhelmed by the number of people who have directly or indirectly contributed to my success. These are just a few of the people I would like to thank. I count myself very lucky to have had both Gillian Sankoff and Bill Labov as an advising team. Gillian’s support and mentorship have been constants throughout my time at Penn. Gillian is always warm and encouraging, and my work has immeasurably benefited from her keen intellectual insight and editing eye. I am also very fortunate to have had Bill as a supervisor for both the writing of this dissertation and the IHELP grant. Bill’s mentorship is filled with humor and compassion, and more innovative ideas than I can count. Together Bill and Gillian have perfectly modeled for me how academics should be: curious, humble, and collegial. A huge thank you also goes to the rest of my dissertation committee, Meredith Tamminga and David Embick, whose feedback always challenged me to go further in my analyses. Meredith has literally mentored me through this program from start to finish, offering guidance and motivation along the way. Dave always asks just the right questions to drive my thinking forward when I’m stuck on something. Both Meredith and Dave encouraged me to write things through rather than thinking them through—an essential part of starting (and finishing) a dissertation! I would also like to thank the rest of the Linguistics faculty and staff at Penn for their mentorship and support. Julie Legate, Tricia Irwin, and Alison Biggs in particular gave insightful feedback at various stages of this dissertation project, helping me to develop a syntactic approach to my research. I could not have navigated the ins and outs of the Linguistics Program without the help of Amy Forsyth, Gene Buckley, and Sue Sheehan. Amy has been a tremendous help in situations ranging from planning events and fulfilling graduation requirements to being locked out of offices. I’ve also enjoyed our chats over the years. Gene’s role in administering our program is understated but essential, and I thank him for responding to my many emails entitled “Just a quick question about…” in relation to the program and its rules & procedures. Sue Sheehan always went well above and beyond her administrative duties to the Sociolinguistics Lab. Betsy said it best when she said that Sue made coming into work feel like coming home. My thanks go to Sue for remembering all of our birthdays and always having homemade treats, scarf wrapping tips, and cute dog pictures on hand! I am indebted to her especially for her kindness and motherly support during the rougher times of the past seven years. During my time at Penn, I also benefited from connections made outside of the Linguistics Department. I would especially like to thank Elaine Simon in the Urban Studies program for finding time to offer her wisdom and mentorship despite everything else she has to do. Additional thanks to David Grossman, Vicky Karkov, Julie McWilliams, Michael Nairn, and Mark Stein. It was a pleasure to work with you all! I’m also appreciative of support from the Fontaine Society whose events and community gave me a sense of belonging and fellowship across the Penn campus. I have also been blessed to build connections with several linguists of color outside of Penn who have been a continuing source of mentorship throughout my career. I had the privilege of having Anita Henderson as a supervisor, both for my second qualifying paper and for the IHELP grant. Anita is generous with both her time and her words, and it means the world to me to have had her looking out for me this whole time. Marlyse Baptista, Renée Blake, Lisa Green, Anne Charity Hudley, Nicole Holliday, Sonja Lanehart, and John Rickford have also shared their wisdom with me when it was most needed. Their guidance has been invaluable along this journey, and their scholarship continues to inspire and motivate me. iv I’m forever indebted to Wendell A. Harris, whose tremendous field research in Philadelphia provided the data for my study. Wendell was a natural at eliciting casual, intimate speech, and I’m grateful to have experienced Philadelphia through his eyes and the eyes of those he recorded. I’m also grateful to Sherry Ash, who originally looked at the use of ain’t for didn’t in Philadelphia in a 1986 study often cited in this dissertation. Sherry graciously dug out her old records and shared them with me during the initial stages of this project. The analyses undertaken in this dissertation would not have been possible if not for a Doctoral Dissertation Research and Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation. This grant enabled me to train undergraduate researchers to aid in transcription, coding, and analysis. For that reason, I’m also indebted to Ashley Barrett, Frehiwet Alfa, Esther Adegbulugbe, Setria Agudu, Alexus Bazen, Seyi Osundeko, and Katie Smith for their work on this project. I’m very fortunate to have been surrounded by a group of supportive and inspiring current and past Linguistics graduate students and visiting scholars at Penn. Special thanks to my cohort (Mao-Hsu Chen, Sunghye Cho, Aaron Freeman, Anton Ingason, Henrik Koivuniemi) and Phuntax (Haitao Cai, Amy Goodwin Davies, Eric Doty, Duna Gylfadóttir, Einar Sigurðsson, Betsy Sneller, Robert Wilder) for camaraderie and commiseration throughout it all. Thanks also to Soohyun Kwon for her encouragement, understanding, and brilliant smile, which kept my spirits up at the toughest grad school moments. Thanks to Betsy Sneller for being a fun and intellectually stimulating lab mate to have for several years. Thanks to Luke Adamson, Amy Goodwin Davies, and Helen Jeoung for unhesitatingly agreeing to help me flesh out ideas as I worked through my analyses.
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