The (r)-ful Truth about African Nova Scotian English

James A. Walker

Fri. 4:25-5:40 B

Studies of (r)-deletion in AAVE have generally focused on the relationship between (r)-lessness in the AAVE community and (r)-lessness in the surrounding dialect. African Nova Scotian English (ANSE), which is derived from an earlier form of AAVE, is located in an (r)-ful dialect area. This paper reports a variable-rule analysis of the occurrence of (r)-deletion in a corpus of data drawn from the ANSE corpus (Poplack and Tagliamonte 1991). Tokens were coded for the quality of the nucleus and the stress of the syllable in which (r) occurred, the nature of the following segment, whether it was tautosyllabic with (r), and the grammatical category of the word, as well as for social factors such as sex, age, and years of education. These were subjected to multivariate analysis, using GoldVarb (Rand and Sankoff 1988).

Preliminary results show that syllable stress and the quality of the nucleus contribute significant effects to (r)-deletion, that syllabic (r) patterns differently from other syllabic nuclei, and that (r)-deletion correlates inversely with the education of the speaker. These results parallel those found by Myhill (1988) for the AAVE community in Philadelphia. Moreover, despite the (r)-fulness of the surrounding prestige dialect, the overall rate of (r)-lessness in ANSE (roughly 60%) is similar to that found in Philadelphia, where the surrounding dialect also has a low rate of (r)-lessness (Myhill 1988). The fact that not only the overall rate of deletion, but also the factors conditioning deletion, are similar in both communities suggests that this feature, as well as the linguistic system in which it is embedded, was brought into Canada at the time of migration (early nineteenth century) and not acquired later. These results converge with findings from the syntactic and semantic components of the grammar (Poplack and Tagliamonte 1991, Poplack and Tagliamonte 1994), to demonstrate that, despite over 150 years of evolution in Canada, the basic grammar of ANSE has undergone surprisingly little influence from surrounding dialects.