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“ Selected words, phrases, and meanings of African (American) provenance in White American English: A corpus-based study ” [ work in progress ]. Radosław Dylewski (dradek@ifa.amu.edu.pl) Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. Incentive behind the present study :
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“Selected words, phrases, and meanings of African (American) provenance in White American English: A corpus-based study”[work in progress] Radosław Dylewski (dradek@ifa.amu.edu.pl) Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland
Incentive behind the present study: Frequent claims of Geneva Smitherman: • “Black innovations in word, sound and syntax have continued unabated. In this postmodern, high-tech, cyberspace, media-driven era, African American Semantics crosses over fast and furious” (Smitherman 2006: 111). • the influence of AAVE on white speech is increasingly evident in the thousands of “examples of Black linguistic crossover into mainstream English – from the ever-popular Black “high five” that can be seen everywhere in White America, to words like “phat” and “bling-bling,” now comfortably housed in standard dictionaries of American English” (Smitherman 2006: 7).
Analyzed Corpora: a) American National Corpus 22 MILLION WORDS, 1990-2005
Analyzed Corpora: b) BYU Corpus of American English 360+ MILLION WORDS, 1990-2007 http://www.americancorpus.org
Background information: • Undoubtedly, African and African American contributions to American English vocabulary are visible through music, mainly jazz, recently - rap/hip hop. • When it comes to the linguistic “crossover” from the speech of Blacks to that Whites, apart from words borrowed from African languages or coined in African American speech, the African (American) semantic slant can be also transferred to common English words which then have a “double or even quadruple level meanings for Blacks. I got a bad cold means just that, whereas I got a bad dress means a good, i.e., beautiful dress” (Smitherman 1974: 17).
Background information (cont.) • the path of the said transfer from the speech of African Americans to the one of European Americans: the majority of words, meanings, and expressions are created and, at least primarily, exist in the realm of white slang or jargon; some of them are apparently short-lived, whereas some, with passing of time, might leave slang verbiage and transfer to colloquial and eventually mainstream (American) English (Major 1994, as quoted in Rickford-Rickford 2000)
Methodology 1 • Selection of words for analysis: the author relied on subject literature written preponderantly by African American authors (for instance, Mufwene 2003, Rickford-Rickford 2000, Green 2002, Lee 1999, Smitherman 2006, among other authors) who oftentimes brought their “own knowledge of, and experience with, black verbal expressions” to their studies (Lee 1999: 372). In order to make the list demonstrative, the author has selected various parts of speech as well as acronyms, clipped-forms, olderand recent borrowings, loan translations, phrases, English words with new meaning, and, finally, some syntactic structures regarded as having African-American origin.
Methodology 2 • The material (initially approximately 120 entries) has been further sifted out in the following way: a given item has been taken into account if it has been attested at least in two of the consulted studies (after Lee 1999) plus – ideally – in the Oxford English Dictionarywith an annotation that it is either of African/AAVE origin or in use by African-descended Americans.
Methodology 3 – the terms which have made their way to the study must belong to either of the following categories (the categories are obviously not mutually exclusive): 1. words of African origin (e.g., okra, gumbo); 2. African American Vernacular English slang words which transferred to White American English (rip off); 3. words of uncertain but presumably African or Ebonics origin (chigger); 4. English words and phrases whose acquired meanings are different from the corresponding homonyms in general American English lexicons ((main) squeeze); 5. loan translations, not direct borrowings from the African languages (Green 2002: 20).
Methodology 4 • The attestations spotted in the texts where a thematic factor might or have played a decisive role in the choice of a given word/phrase/meaning have been ignored. Consequently, the items of interest which have been retrieved from the articles/magazines devoted to Americans of African descent or their language or the ones containing verbatim quotes of utterances made by African Americans (as well as titles) have been left out.
Methodology 5 • Additionally, occurrences spotted both in the Internet blogs as well as students’ conversations - the two being a part of the American National Corpus - have been approached with necessary caution for the following reason: due to the anonymity of Internet blogs, it is obviously impossible to identify a given blogger’s linguistic background, but for their consistency in the use of forms, words, and structures of presumably colloquial, African American, dialectal, etc. character. Hence, while analyzing the instances whose author’s linguistic background proved hard to determine, a broader context has also been scrutinized in search of indicative forms, not only lexical, but also morphosyntactic and orthographic.
Methodology 6 • Example: the concentration of forms typical originally of AAVE in a given ‘utterance’ “Wassup, ma peeps? Who are you, and what did you do with ita??” or “you've been hanging around Peeps too long, haven't you? Rio is just a kewt an' fwuffy widdle sweetums of a muffin-face. Yes she is! Yeeess she iiiisss!! Wuzza wuzza wuzza! Oh yeah, cute as the dickens, she is...[ANC_leisure] brought about the exclusion of a given attestation, even though it might have equally served a stylistic purpose, i.e., to give the impression of ‘coolness’ or utter colloquialness.
Figure 2. The number of hits <10 and >0 (American National Corpus)
Table 2. The division of the collected items alongside the thematic domains
Figure 3. Distribution of forms in spoken and written media (ANC)
Table 3. Distribution of Black expressions in the spoken part of ANC Figure 4. Distribution of forms across three text types in the spoken register
Table 4. Distribution of Black expressions in the written part of ANC Figure 5. Distribution of forms across eight text types in the written register
Table 5. Distribution of forms across the level of formality – written part of the ANC Figure 6. Distribution of forms according to the level of formality
Figure 7. African (American) words in the ANC and the BYU CAE
Figure 8. Distribution of forms across five registers in the BYU CAE
Conclusions • It seems that the majority of words/phrases of African (American) descent or the ones which adopted AAVE meanings still exist in the realm of American slang or at least informal, every-day speech of especially younger generation of Americans. • The Internet might propel the pace of the linguistic cross-over. • For the time being, at least, this supposed Africanization of White American does not seem as ostensible as Geneva Smitherman would like it to be.
