Morphosyntactic Features in Late 19th Century African American Vernacular English

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of African American Vernacular English as a literary dialect. The analysis is based on a corpus containing data collected from two 19th century American novels: ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ by Mark Twain and ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The speech of two characters of African American descent is under scrutiny: Jim and Aunt Chloe. The first part of the study provides an overview of the sociohistorical context in which AAVE originated and subsequently developed. The paper also highlights several morphosyntactic features attested in AAVE and the last part aims at identifying such features in the speech of the two African American characters aforementioned.

Keywords

• african american vernacular english
• literary dialect
• variety
• ebonics
• dialectal writing