Selected words, phrases, and meanings of African American provenance in White American English: A co

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Selected words, phrases, and meanings
of African (American) provenance in White
American English A corpus-based studywork in
progress

• Radoslaw Dylewski
• (dradek_at_ifa.amu.edu.pl)
• Adam Mickiewicz University,
• Poznan, Poland

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• 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).

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Analyzed Corpora

• a) American National Corpus
• 22 MILLION WORDS, 1990-2005

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Table 1. The content of the American National
Corpus
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Analyzed Corpora
b) BYU Corpus of American English 360 MILLION
WORDS, 1990-2007 http//www.americancorpus.org
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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).

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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)

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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, older and recent
  borrowings, loan translations, phrases, English
  words with new meaning, and, finally, some
  syntactic structures regarded as having
  African-American origin.

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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 Dictionary with an
  annotation that it is either of African/AAVE
  origin or in use by African-descended Americans.

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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).

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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.

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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 bloggers
  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 authors 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.

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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.

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Figure 1. The number of hits 10 (American
National Corpus)
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Figure 2. The number of hits 0 (American
National Corpus)

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Table 2. The division of the collected items
alongside the thematic domains

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Figure 3. Distribution of forms in spoken and
written media (ANC)

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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
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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
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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
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Figure 7. African (American) words in the ANC and
the BYU CAE
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Figure 8. Distribution of forms across five
registers in the BYU CAE

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Figure 9. The number of hits 200 (BYU CAE)
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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.

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Thank you.