Overview

Based on a 500,000 word corpus of early souces collected from ex-slaves narratives, ex-slaves recordings and interviews with hoodoo priests, this book reconstructs the English spoken by African Americans between 1830 and 1920. By means of detailed quantitive analyses, three linguistic features (negation patterns, copula usage and relative marker choice) are intercepted along the lines of temporal change, regional diveristy and variation across gender. Additionally, some 300 non-standard latters written by African Americans in the 19th century are compared to the main corpus in order to identify differences between speech and writing.

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9783110173017

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Author Information

Alexander Kautzsch is lecturer at the University of Regensburg, Germany.

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