An Investigation into the Prosody of Camouflaged Forms in African American English: Past-Tense Ain’t Open Access
Farrell, Jane (Spring 2022)
Published
Abstract
African American English (AAE) is an extraordinarily rich language that is the subject of many works of sociolinguistic research. One variable of AAE that lacks extensive research is the grammatically camouflaged variable past-tense ain’t. This study approaches the variable from a prosodic perspective-an angle less frequently used in AAE research.Previously, it has been found that in the AAE aspect system, stressed BIN and unstressed been have different grammatical restrictions (DeBose,2015), showing us that prosody is partially defining the feature’s semantics and grammar. Clauses that include tokens of ain’t in the DCA, DCB, and PRV corpora from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) were extracted and measured at the word level for duration and pitch using Praat(Boersma and Weenink2016) and a script developed by Dr.Tyler Kendall. Tokens of ain’t were coded as either past and present tense and effects of maximum pitch, duration, gender (male or female) and location of speaker were examined, as well as interactions between gender and word duration, maximum pitch, and location. Maximum pitch was found to have a meaningful effect in predicting that an instance of ain’t would be past tense, while word duration had a marginally meaningful effect. Women used pitch at a meaningful level while men did not, and the feature is more likely to appear in Washington, D.C. speakers versus those in Princeville, North Carolina-- providing evidence to claims that this is a northern urban innovation (Wolfram, 2004; Howe, 2005; Fisher, 2018). A pilot study was conducted with 20–22-year-old African American and non-African American males and females to investigate whether these cues are being used in perception. Participants were presented with audio of utterances containing past and present forms of ain’t from two male and female speakers from the DCB corpus and asked to indicate whether the utterance they heard was in the past or present tense. Preliminary data shows trends of higher rates of accuracy from African American listeners overall and in responding to past tense utterances. The pilot study presents interesting trends that prompt further study and hint at the use of prosodic cues in the perception of the past-tense ain’t feature.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................1
Literature Review..................................................................................................................1
Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL).........................................................6
METHODS.....................................................................................................................................6
The Chosen Datasets and their Speakers............................................................................. .....7
Coding.................................................................................................................................. 9
Statistical Analysis................................................................................................................11
PRODUCTION RESULTS................................................................................................................13
DISCUSSION................................................................................................................................ 21
EXPERIMENT INTRODUCTION............................................................................................... ......23
EXPERIMENT METHODS......................................................................................................... .....24
Participants......................................................................................................................... 25
PERCEPTION RESULTS.................................................................................................................26
Differences in Performance based on Ethnicity................................................................ .........26
Differences in performance based on Sex and Ethnicity.................................................. ...........30
Females......................................................................................................................... . 30
Males............................................................................................................................ ..31
Performance in the Perception of Specific Past Tense Utterances............................................. .33
DISCUSSION................................................................................................................................36
CONCLUSIONS............................................................................................................................ 41
REFERENCES...............................................................................................................................42
APPENDIX...................................................................................................................................50
List of Tables:
Table 1. Criteria for determining semantic category based on main verb morphology…………...................3
List of Figures:
Figure 1. An example of an ain’t token…..…………………………………………...…..…..................................10
Figure 2. Predicted probabilities of past-tense ain’t based on word duration:
All speakers…...............................................................................................................................14
Figure 3. Predicted probabilities of past-tense ain’t based on maximum pitch:
All speakers…..............................................................................................................................14
Figure 4. Predicted probabilities of past-tense ain’t usage by
location of speakers……...…...........................................................................................................15
Figure 5. Predicted probabilities of past-tense ain’t based on word duration
by location……..............................................................................................................................16
Figure 6. Predicted probabilities of past-tense ain’t based on maximum pitch
by location................................................................................................................................... 17
Figure 7. Predicted probabilities of ‘past-tense’ ain’t based on word duration
by gender: All speakers……………………………………………………………………….......................................18
Figure 8. Predicted probabilities of past-tense ain’t based on maximum pitch
by gender: All speakers……………………………………………………...……………….......................................19
Figure 9. Predicted probabilities of past-tense ain’t based on word duration
with interactions between gender and location of speakers………………………………...............................20
Figure 10. Predicted probabilities of past-tense ain’t based on maximum pitch
with interactions between gender and location of speakers………………………………...............................21
Figure 11. Proportion of correct responses by Ethnicity: All utterances
containing ain’t…..........................................................................................................................27
Figure 12. Proportion of correct responses by Ethnicity:
Tense of utterance containing ain’t……..…...……………………………………...………..................................28
Figure 13. Proportion of correct responses by Ethnicity when responding to past tense
utterances spoken by either a female or a male……………………………………..……..….............................29
Figure 14. Overall performance of participants by Sex and Ethnicity: Females……......................... ..…..30
Figure 15. Proportion of correct responses: Females responding to past and
present tense utterances ..............................................................................................................31
Figure 16. Proportion of correct responses: Females responding to past tense
utterances spoken by either a female or a male……………………………………….…..…..............................31
Figure 17. Overall performance of participants by Sex and Ethnicity: Males......................... ................32
Figure 18. Proportion of correct responses: Males responding to past and
present tense utterances…………………………...……….………………………...…….................................... .32
Figure 19. Proportion of correct response: Males responding to past tense utterances
spoken by either a female or male………………………………….……………………....................................... 32
Figure 20. Proportion of participants answering correctly by Ethnicity: “so I ain’t know
nothing about it” ……………………………………………………………………….…............................................33
Figure 21. Proportion of participants answering correctly by Ethnicity: “ain’t nothing
really happen”...…………………………………………………….………………...……..........................................34
Figure 22. Proportion of participants answering correctly by Ethnicity: “me and school
ain’t never get along”…………………………………………………………………...……....................................…35
Figure 23. Proportion of participants answering correctly by Ethnicity: “we ain’t really go
out too much”………………………………………………………………..……………...….......................................35
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Primary PDF
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An Investigation into the Prosody of Camouflaged Forms in African American English: Past-Tense Ain’t () | 2022-05-07 19:42:17 -0400 |
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Supplemental Files
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Production Data (Production data used for analysis) | 2022-04-18 14:39:34 -0400 |
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