4.2 African American English外国文学名著导读.pdf

Chapter Four 4.2 African American English Roles of African American English (1) Solidarity: A common language of the black community in the US; (2) Identity: A language showing cultural identity; (3) Communication: A communicative tool of African Americans. Pronunciation Features (1) non-rhotic E.g. /r/ : car, park, bird (2) No use of consonant clusters (in final positions) E.g. and west, “an” “wes” Pronunciation Features (3) –ing: /ɪŋ/ /ɪn/ E.g. comin, runnin coming, running (4) /θ//ð/ /f/ /d/ E.g. souf, dat day, dis house south, that day, this house Lexical Features Lexical Features: Innovations “stay”: (1) I stay in Robertson Road for years. (I live in Robertson Road for years.) (2) He stay in the air. (He is always flying.) (3) He stay hungry. (He is always hungry.) “Stay” carries a habitual meaning. Lexical Features: Slangs “money”: greens, bills, dividents, benjis, cabbage, cheese, cream, duckets, franklins, paper, scrila, bucks, dead presidents, dime, knot, dough Grammatical Features (1) It ain’t no food here. (There is no food here.) (2) They be fightin. (They are always fighting.) (3) He like to hit his head on the door. (He almost hit his head on the door.) Syntactic Features in African American English (Jordan, 1985) (1) Use double or triple negatives for dramatic emphasis; (2) Eliminate the use of verb “to be” whenever possible; (3) Use “be” or “been” only when describing a habitual occurrence; (4) Zero copula; (5) Never use the -ed suffix to indicate the past tense; Syntactic Features in African American English (Jordan, 1985) (6) Observe a minimal inflection of verbs; (7) If the modifier indicates plurality, then the noun remains in the singular case; (8) Stay in the present tense unless you want to underscore