Negative concord in early Black English

Darrin Howe

Fri. 2:00-4:05 B

In this paper I describe patterns in the use of negative concord in three varieties representing Antebellum African American English. Under "negative concord" I consider all constructions where multiple occurrences of morphologically negative constituents express a single logical negation, including not only cases of negative concord with indefinites as in (1) but also with verbs as in (2).

(1) (a) There ain't NOBODY gonna hurt NO KIDS (ANSE/038/460)

(b) Nobody give NOBODY NOTHING to eat (ANSE/030/666)

(2) (a) They didn't think we still WASN'T GONE in our bed (ANSE/019/232)

(b) No one DIDN'T RING UP (ANSE/030/451)

The study of this phenomenon is interesting for a number of reasons. First, negative concord takes several forms in early Black English, and the lexical and syntactic constraints on some of these are not known for any language. Second, recent theoretical work on negation has provided a wealth of hypotheses that can be tested against negative concord phenomena. Third, findings about grammatical structures in early Black English weigh heavily in the ongoing debates over the origins and development of African American Vernacular English.

The data on which this study is based were extracted from recorded interviews with members of the African American diaspora in Nova Scotia, Canada (Poplack & Tagliamonte 1991) and Samana, Dominican Republic (Poplack & Sankoff 1989; 1987) and compared with data from the Ex-slave Recordings (e.g. Bailey et al. 1991). The resulting corpus allows for the largest quantitative study of negative concord phenomena to date.

Adopting the variationist approach, I show that early Black English participates in two distinct patterns of negative concord (viz. negative spreading and negative doubling) and that the application of negative concord is conditioned by a complex series of constraints, including parallel processing and specific semantic and syntactic structures (e.g. negative polarity items, [mass] or [plural] indefinites, negative raising environments, same-clause location). Comparison of distributions reveals that early Black English is more conservative than AAVE (e.g. Labov et al. 1968; Wolfram 1969). Moreover, comparison with sociolinguistic studies in White English (e.g. Feagin 1979; Cheshire 1982) as well as historical studies (e.g. Coombs 1976; Nagucka 1978; Jack 1978) argue that the variable use of negative concord in early Black English can be traced back to the origins of English.

References

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Cheshire, J. 1982. Variation in an English dialect: a sociolinguistic study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Jack, G. B. 1978. Negative concord in early Middle English. Studia Neophilologica 50: 29-39.

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