Abstract
Using language samples from 3- to 5-year-old developing African American English (AAE) speakers in southwest Louisiana, the author of an earlier landmark work on the grammar of adult AAE documents how children acquire the language structures, meanings, and patterns of use of their communities. In this book, Green, a scholar in theoretical syntax, establishes child AAE as a complete system with consistent developmental benchmarks. Through a methodical inquiry into the linguistic components of the AAE system Green shows that its acquisition is not an imperfect attempt to acquire Mainstream American English (MAE). She challenges accounts of AAE which privilege the role of features maximally different from MAE while demonstrating, conversely, that overlapping forms are not always isomorphic in terms of their respective meanings in each variety. Green ends the book by discussing practical applications for the developmental patterns in the data, using an evidence-based approach to create an awareness of what meanings children target when using AAE to approach the MAE system.
Through recourse to ample excerpts of real conversations in the book, Green unlocks the distinct forms and functions of structures ranging from copula marking in both stative and eventive sentences to negative concord marking across relative clause barriers. Along these lines, Green writes at the vanguard of burgeoning research in child AAE and syntactic variation; she has also produced a work that is accessible as a reference for speech pathologists, teachers, and early childhood educators.
The book’s first chapter reviews the literature on child AAE since the 1970s, from foundational work on descriptive frameworks for AAE (Stockman & Vaughn-Cooke, 1982) to studies of exemplar morphological forms (Kovac, 1980; Steffensen, 1974; Stokes, 1976) to practical research on assessment and literacy (Charity Hudley & Mallinson, 2010; Craig & Washington, 2006; Labov, 1995; Seymour, Roeper, & J. de Villiers, with P. A. de Villiers, 2003). Green then gives a sketch of the speech community and the history of the project; she has been working in the same early child care center since 2003, collecting data from both spontaneous conversations and elicited tasks that include production and comprehension activities. Finally, she gives examples of features which make the variety in question similar to other regional AAEs (r-vocalization, consonant cluster reduction, use of finna/fitna = ‘getting ready to’) as well as to Southwest Louisiana Vernacular English (expletive it followed by have, affirmative and negative tags yes/yeah and no).
Chapter 2 begins by critiquing earlier attempts to characterize the AAE system (including feature lists and dual components) and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. For example, Green argues that traditional feature lists and dialect density measures (DDM), while serving as a handy tool for practitioners, do not capture dynamic properties of inherent variation or language development. Instead, she advocates a patterns- and systems-based approach which provides an explanatory mechanism for the processes of AAE acquisition while recognizing the complexity of strategies children use to convey messages within a ‘multidimensional, multifarious communicative system . . . [which] as a system of communication, has a range of uses and can be used by some, not all, speakers in varying degrees’ (p. 32). This model has the advantage of being able to capture nested hierarchies between isolated features (preverbal had), systematic properties exhibited by those features (verbs of achievement and accomplishment are more frequently marked with preverbal had), and finally, overarching systems (a unitary account of tense- and aspect-marking in terms of a suite of grammaticalized markers, including preverbal had).
Chapters 3 and 4 begin the analysis proper by addressing children’s system of tense-aspect marking in both non-past/habitual and past contexts, with particular attention to how verb forms are used for talking about type and time of eventualities (e.g. events vs. states). In non-past contexts, for example, the copula and auxiliary BE form may or may not be present in children’s speech (They Ø
COP
tall or They Ø
AUX
talking vs. And he
In the second half of chapter 3, Green presents data which distinguish the function of copula/auxiliary BE from that of aspectual be (be ASP ), which is used for marking habitual eventualities (Akila: ‘Cause when I watch Blues Clues, my eyes be like this <makes blinking motion with eyes>). Here, Green presents convincing evidence from comprehension tasks that children associate be ASP with habitual meaning, as in adult AAE: when children were presented with a scenario where a character is portrayed as eating a turkey sandwich day after day (but not at the speech time or present), they chose that character as the answer to the target question Who be eating turkey sandwiches? (i.e. even though Bruce is portrayed in the last story frame to be eating, as a change of pace, soup). Here, Green reports that children as a group scored at least 48% accuracy on each aspectual be scenario and as high as 72% accuracy on one of the six scenarios.
In chapter 4, Green discusses the distribution and function of two additional invariant tense-aspect markers which occur in children’s speech: preverbal had and remote past BIN (rendered in capitals since it must be stressed). Adult AAE speakers use preverbal had to mark the MAE function of simple past: thus, in the sentence Bruce had left when the game started, Bruce’s leaving does not occur (at least in adult AAE) farther in the past than when the game started; it only occurs in the past relative to speech time. Green presents speech data from several speakers which illustrate that in child AAE, preverbal had does not only situate an event in the past, but marks the achievement or accomplishment of that event. Thus, He
Chapter 5 continues the analysis proper of child AAE grammar with an in-depth discussion of negative concord, yes-no questions, and wh-questions. Green observes that as in developing MAE, child AAE speakers use multiple negating elements in sentences like They did
In chapter 6, an examination of the strategies children use to produce yes-no and wh-questions, Green considers variable input from adult AAE in which auxiliaries may or may not be (prototypically, for yes-no questions) inverted and in which speakers may or may not use the contour of a sentence-final rise in pitch. She finds that variable patterns for other structures, for instance, variable BE, are also reflected in interrogatives: the data show that children delete copula (auxiliary) in non-prototypical (uninverted) questions like They pretty? but not with It’s/What’s/That’s, as in That’s the dad? Because of these uniform effects, Green argues that non-prototypical (subject-initial) questions are not simply truncated or reduced, nor do they necessarily show that children have not acquired the inversion process. By contrast, the results consistently reflect the variable input patterns of adult AAE syntax. Furthermore, children generally show the presence of (non-copula) auxiliaries in environments where they are required for a distinct meaning (
In the last two chapters, Green deconstructs processes of moving ‘back and forth’ between AAE and MAE by distinguishing between intra-dialectal or variable-shifting and inter-dialectal or ‘true’ code-shifting. Here, children need not move ‘into’ MAE to produce forms which happen to be compatible with MAE but which are actually variants within the AAE system. For example, in talking about the past, children have four variants available to them, represented in the phrase I (had) start(ed) the pinball machine. Green argues that the more accurate way to ‘slice’ the overall picture may be not to consider which forms occur in MAE and which do not, but instead to accurately specify the semantic and pragmatic contexts in which all variants occur within (developmental stages of) the AAE system: do preverbal had and morphologized –ed mark the same sort of meaning (perfective)? If so, do they exist in a concord relationship?
These linguistically-informed kinds of questions, she emphasizes, should be considered in making MAE accessible to students in school environments; here, prescriptively-grounded characterizations (‘grammatical-in MAE-or-NOT_’) may be less useful than principled understandings of which forms may be most salient to children and the functional reasons why. For example, variable past tense –ed may redundantly mark a perfective-type situation in conjunction with preverbal had (and, moreover, simple past –ed meanings may be retrievable from context) whereas –ing might be indispensable in progressive or be ASP contexts since it gives crucial information about events (they are in progress or have a recurrence-type property).
Overall, Green’s nuanced, systematic inquiry is powerful enough to jolt ‘seasoned’ AAE scholars into taking a fresh look at old, familiar structures in a new way – not only with respect to MAE, but from the perspective of the unitary system of developing children themselves.