The development of African American English / Walt Wolfram and Erik R. Thomas.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Status of African American English -- A Unique Database -- The Hyde County Corpus -- Data Analysis -- Beyond Hyde County -- Issues in the Development of African American English -- Hypotheses on Earlier African American English -- Issues in Reconstructing Earlier AAVE -- The nature of earlier written texts -- Spoken language data representing earlier AAVE -- The sociohistorical context of earlier African Americans -- Variation in earlier AAVE -- Donor source attribution -- African American English in the Twentieth Century -- Defining the Enclave Dialect Community -- Introduction -- Historically Isolated Speech Communities -- Geography -- Economy -- Historical continuity -- Social relations -- Group identity -- The social construction of enclave status -- Language Change in Enclave Communities -- Sociolinguistic Principles in the Configuration of Isolated Dialects -- The Social History of Mainland Hyde County -- Chesapeake Bay Origins -- The Settlement of Hyde County -- Hyde County from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War -- Reconstruction to the Great Depression -- Hyde County since 1940 -- Sociohistorical Effects on Language -- Morphosyntactic Alignment in Hyde County English -- Issues in Attribution -- Past Tense be Regularization -- The historical development of leveling to weren't -- Was/weren't leveling in Hyde County -- Copula/Auxiliary Is and Are Absence -- The historical development of copula absence -- Copula absence in Hyde County -- Third Person -s Marking -- The historical development of verbal -s marking -- Verbal -s marking in Hyde County -- Conclusion -- Vocalic Alignment in Hyde County English -- An Overview of Hyde County Vowels -- The Historical Background of Hyde County Vowels -- Quantitative Analysis of Hyde County Vowels -- Conclusions -- Consonantal Alignment in Hyde County English -- Earlier Hyde County Consonants -- The Case of Consonant Cluster Reduction --

The patterning of cluster reduction -- Explaining consonant cluster reduction patterns in 1-Hyde County -- The Case of Postvocalic r Vocalization -- The patterning of postvocalic r-lessness -- Post-/o/ r vocalization -- Conclusion. Intonational Alignment in Hyde County English -- African American and European American Intonation -- Analytical Methods -- Results and Implications -- Conclusions -- The Individual and Group in Earlier African American English -- The Individual and Group in Variation Studies -- The Sample of Elderly African American Speakers -- Some Diagnostic Variables -- Rhoticity -- Syllable-coda consonant cluster reduction -- The vowel system -- Verbal -s concord -- Copula absence -- Past tense be leveling -- Patterns of Correlation and Individuation -- Variation in Earlier AAVE -- Beyond Hyde County : The Past and Present Development of AAVE -- The Origin of African American English -- The Regional Context of Earlier African American English -- Levels of Linguistic Alignment -- The Trajectory of Language Change -- The Norming of AAVE -- Issues in vernacular dialect norming -- Vernacular language norming in Hyde County -- Explaining the supraregional norms of contemporary AAVE -- Conclusion.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.