Abstract
The origins of the features that make African American English (AAE) unique are highly contested (for detailed discussion on AAE origins hypotheses, see various chapters in Lanehart 2015). Some of the most discussed features in this debate are those that relate to the present tense copula. In their 2022 monograph from the Cambridge Elements series Inheritance and innovation in the evolution of rural African American English, Bailey, Cukor-Avila, and Salinas discuss two of these copula features, namely invariant be (“You know only time we really be busy is on Saturdays” [13]) and zero copula (“Where her 0 shoes at?” [25]).
The authors aim to show how these features changed to their contemporary forms in the early twentieth century. Their monograph leads the reader through an apparent time analysis of the Springville Corpus, one of the largest and longest running corpora of AAE. Sections 1 and 2 introduce the problem, datasets, and the theoretical underpinning of their methodological choices. Sections 3 and 4 present the literature, methods, and results of the two features under question. Sections 5 and 6 discuss the creation and spread of these features in light of linguistic innovation and sociohistorical context. This monograph calls into question numerous assumptions made in previous work about the origins of contemporary AAE features using a systematic and well-informed approach which makes it an important read for scholars interested in AAE development specifically, World Englishes more broadly, and language change in general.
Section 1 sets the theoretical context for what the study of AAE can add to our understanding of the development of postcolonial varieties of English. While the specific context for AAE development is not exactly like other World Englishes, they argue that the social and linguistic context of the earliest time periods resembled plantation colonies of the Caribbean (1). Whether the context is sufficiently similar to categorize AAE as such in the eyes of World Englishes scholars, the theoretical contributions about language change still stand.
Section 2 describes and defends their choice of research site and use of apparent time methodology. The Springville Project is a sociolinguistic field site located in rural Texas which began data collection in the late 1980s and continues to this day. The community of around 160 people is about seventy percent African American and represents the type of community most African Americans would have lived in during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such, they argue sites like this are uniquely situated for understanding the evolution of AAE in the US South during these earlier time periods from which there is not much representative data (7). The corpus has “over 2,500,000 words of African American speech” from interviews including “almost 30,000 finite, present tense, copula/auxiliary forms” (9) and data from participants with birth years ranging from 1890 to 1990. The authors supplement the time depth of this corpus by analyzing data from a corpus of ex-slave narratives. They successfully argue for the use of this corpus and methodology for readers with prior knowledge of African Americans in the US, but readers without a nuanced understanding of US history and geography may not fully understand the theoretical decisions supporting the creation and analysis of the corpus. As an example, the inclusion of highly specific details, like the year a rail line was established (6) will help familiar readers understand the typicality of this community but may occlude the central point for readers without this prior knowledge.
Section 3 builds their argument about the change of invariant be from a simple alternate form of are, am, or is to the durative/habitual marker associated with present-day AAE. They argue that be, which was inherited directly from British colonists without specific meaning, went through a three-stage process of reanalysis in the early- to mid-twentieth century primarily because of the separate process of will/would deletion, as in “Nuh uh it’ll make you drowsy an’ you (will) be sleepy” (15). This process created phrases with be in the copula position that were structurally and functionally distinct from, but on the surface identical to sentences in which be was an alternate form of the present-tense verb. Their argument is noteworthy since it highlights the importance of internal changes to the development of contemporary AAE, rather than relying too heavily on direct inheritance from British English varieties or contact with other languages early in AAE’s creation; a feat that is perhaps only possible now that this type of large corpus exists.
Section 4 similarly builds the argument surrounding the change of zero copula. The arguments in this section are particularly compelling and challenge some long-held assumptions about copula absence in AAE. They show that zero copula in contemporary AAE is not simply the absence of a variable, rather it is an aspectual marker that marks non-stativity. This non-stative meaning developed at the same time as the durative/habitual meaning of be, and is shown through similar apparent time figures.
The results and argumentation of sections 3 and 4 could have been strengthened by the addition of raw frequencies instead of simply percentages. Such frequencies would have clarified the robustness of the patterns and trends. For example, Figure 2 (18) shows that eighty percent of invariant be tokens in the 1921-1944 age group were in durative/habitual contexts, but there is no way to tell if this is representative of eighty tokens or of eight. Additionally, details about the statistical modeling are absent. For example, the analysis of zero copula was done via a logistic regression and R2 but there is no full table of the regression results and minimal discussion of the specific factors and levels. This at times leaves the discussion difficult to evaluate and limits other scholars in their ability to replicate the results.
The presentation of results aside, the authors build an argument that provides a plausible explanation for the development of invariant be and zero copula in AAE. In section 5 the authors further discuss how these two features gained their contemporary meaning by illustrating the mechanism by which the changes likely spread. Early in the monograph I was skeptical that a study of linguistic innovation in a rural Texas town could explain how those features came to exist throughout AAE varieties but this sociohistorical account more than stopped those doubts. They argue that although regional varieties of AAE were not identical, they had similar linguistic contexts that set the stage for the adoption of these innovations. Sociohistorical events in the early 1900s like the movement of African Americans out of the rural south to urban centers in the north increased contact between speakers of AAE from different communities. These migrants maintained social ties with their rural communities which allowed for the spread and adoption of these features across regions. This line of argumentation illustrates the importance of sociohistorical context to language change.
In sum, Bailey, Cukor-Avila, and Salinas successfully demonstrate “how the interaction of inheritance with innovation can shape emerging varieties” (3). For readers interested in AAE, this monograph calls into question foundational assumptions about the origins of canonical AAE features and provides plausible explanations for how the features developed relatively late in African American history. For those more broadly interested in language change, some of the historical context may not be easy for everyone to decipher, but the conclusions that illustrate how linguistic innovation and sociohistorical context cause and spread language change make this an interesting and compelling read for a wide variety of theorists.
