NOTICE OF THESIS EXAM AQIL MUNAWAR 2020-0001-0013

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NOTICE OF THESIS EXAM

AQIL MUNAWAR

2020-0001-0013

 

August  1, 2024, 2:00 PM

Building C, Room 706

 

Adviser           : Dr. Engliana, M.Hum.

 

Examiners     : Christine Manara, Ph.D. & Yanti, Ph.D.

 

Title

CORPUS STUDY OF CODE-SWITCHING AND STYLE SHIFTING IN

AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH

Abstract

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is an English variety spoken by most African Americans and some Black Canadians. Until recently, AAVE has been viewed as inferior, or “broken” English, consequently also creating a stigma around those who use it. However, more recent studies (such as Mufwene et al.,1998; Labov & Harris, 1986) have broken away from this traditional view and have asserted that AAVE is simply an English variety, with its own set of rules and grammatical features. This paper aligns with such recent research in viewing AAVE as equal to any other language. Specifically, this research explores how AAVE speakers switch between AAVE and Standard English (SE) in conversation. To do this, the authors used data from the Corpus of Regional African American English (CORAAL – Kendal, et al., 2023). Specific AAVE features such as copula absence and the perfective marker “done” were compiled to investigate the trends in the rate of AAVE use compared to SE use from year 1968 to 2019. Additionally, the researchers looked at specific instances of when AAVE or SE are used to uncover the speakers’ pattern of switching between the two languages. The investigation reveals that AAVE speakers do not use AAVE exclusively; instead, they switch comfortably between AAVE and SE within the same conversation. The rate of AAVE use are higher than that of SE over the years, with a general trend of increase during the year 1968 and 2018, but with other general trend of decrease in other years. The study found that males are more likely to use AAVE features compared to females. The study found that various subject types contribute to the utilization of copula absence with verb progressive “-ing,” but do not contribute to the usage of copula absence with “gonna.” The use of copula absence with "gonna" is influenced by positive sentence patterns and copula absence with the verb progressive "-ing" is more common in interrogative sentence patterns. The study found exploration of the switch patterns between AAVE and SE uncovers two types of switching: 1) style shifting; and 2) code-switching. Style-shifting is observed in that speakers use AAVE when discussing informal topics related to family, hobbies and interests; but switch to SE when discussing more formal topics related to school and education (Labov, 2001; Renn & Terry, 2009). Outside of such obvious style-shifting cases, the data shows that code-switching is also often employed by these speakers. For example, within the same context of discussions, speakers often freely switch between AAVE and SE. This detailed look into the interplay of AAVE and SE is very valuable as most other research on the topic focus solely on AAVE, ignoring the fact that most AAVE speakers are also speakers of SE and that they often use the two English varieties together.

Keywords: African American Vernacular English, Corpus study, code-switching,

style-shifting