The loss of a grammatical feature over time: The case of verbal -s in AAVE

Patricia Cukor-Avila

Sat. 11:00-12:40 B

The frequency and distribution of verbal -s in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been the focus of numerous studies over the past three decades. Most of the discussion of this feature has centered around the question of whether verbal -s is present in the underlying grammar of AAVE speakers. While early studies (Labov et al. 1968) suggested that verbal -s was not an underlying part of the AAVE grammatical system and was subject to an -s insertion rule (Fasold 1972), more recent research (Poplack and Tagliamonte 1989, 1991, 1992) shows that -s was much more robust in earlier varieties of AAVE than linguists originally thought. If this is the case then -s has not been inserted over the years but rather lost, since contemporary urban vernacular speakers show high rates of -s absence (cf. Labov et al. 1968; Myhill and Harris 1986; Rickford 1992). The present paper examines the factors concerning the loss of verbal -s in AAVE, documenting its gradual disappearance over time. The data for this paper come from a longitudinal study of residents born between 1913 and 1982 from the rural Texas community of Springville.

Bailey, Maynor, and Cukor-Avila (1989) show that the distribution of verbal -s in black folk speech in both singular and plural environments is influenced not only by person/number concord, but also by the NP/PRO constraint -- a preference for -s after an NP regardless of person/number. My data show that as the NP/PRO constraint starts to break down in the speech of AAVE speakers born between WWI and WWII, -s initially expands into 1st singular and 3rd plural (for the oldest speakers in this time period), and then gradually begins to disappear (for the speakers born just prior to WWII). The trigger for its variable use and subsequent loss probably lies in the fact that there were two competing functions for one form: NP/PRO and subject/verb agreement. While other varieties of English resolved this issue by losing the NP/PRO constraint in favor of person/number concord, AAVE has resolved the difficulties simply by losing the morpheme.