Some propositions on prepositions:

A semantic analysis of preposition usage in rural AAVE

Kathleen Carey & Patricia Cukor-Avila

Fri. 2:00-4:05 B

Unlike other grammatical features of AAVE, preposition usage has received little attention in the literature. The few studies that have been published (Sommer 1991, Nichols 1986, Orr 1987) have focused primarily on spatial uses of the prepositions, e.g., the use of at where non-vernacular usage would require to, as in She goes down at Mapleton sometimes and I miss her a whole lot (Sommer 1991:189).¹ These previous studies typically provide little semantic analysis, particularly in regard to non-spatial uses, in which they often merely list examples. The present study provides a comprehensive cognitive-semantic analysis of preposition usage in rural AAVE that accounts for both spatial and non-spatial uses. (Cf. Herskovits 1986 and Brugman 1981 for a cognitive/semantic analysis of non-vernacular English preposition usage.) The data for this examination come from two sources: an ethnolinguistic study of four generations of African Americans in the rural east-central Texas community of Springville and interviews with former slaves that were mechanically recorded in the 1930s and 1940s. Taken together, these sources give us linguistic evidence that spans 130 years in apparent time, as well as data which reflect real time differences.

In addition to the vernacular uses that have already been addressed in the literature, e.g., the at/to uses mentioned above, the data from Springville contains examples that have received scant (if any) previous attention. One class of examples involves the use of to in an accompaniment sense, as in example (1) below. Another class of examples involves the use of at where non-vernacular English would require the null form, as in example (2) below.

(1) And that's when I had go, just go a bran' new camera and I had film to it.

(2) It comes on at every weekday on Channel 14.

Other vernacular uses are evident in the expression of cause/effect relationships, as in examples (3) and (4) below. Example (3) shows that rural AAVE differs from non-vernacular usage in that the subject of the by-clause need not be coreferential with the subject of the main clause. (Compare (3) with By her being too strict on me, she caused me to make a mistake.) Example (4) demonstrates that the main clause subject associated with from subordinate clauses may have the semantic role of agent. This is not the case in the corresponding non-vernacular construction: note the contrast between the grammatical I got sick from eating too much (with a patient subject) and the ungrammatical *Mary killed the dog from running it over (with an agent subject).

(3) By her being too strict on me, I made the mistake anyway.

(4) You ran him off from talking too much.

By comparing the data from the former slaves with the data from Springville, the paper also attempts to determine whether particular vernacular uses, such as those exemplified in (1) - (4) above, are old or innovative features of AAVE.

¹Cf. Wolfram and Christian (1976) for a discussion of a similar phenomenon in rural white speech.