A message from the past: Past temporal reference in early African American letters.

Abstract

This study employs the methods of comparative and variationist linguistics in a new data source, letters by semiliterate 19th-century Liberian immigrants, to confirm and extend the findings of earlier studies on the past temporal reference system of Early African American English (AAE). In the first half of the study, the strongest linguistic constraints on the choice of bare verb forms match precisely those described for large-scale studies of spoken (diaspora) Early AAE: the bare form results from consonant cluster simplification in weak verbs, and from lexical preferences attested through the history of English in the case of strong verbs. Conditioning factors proposed to result from earlier creole influence on Early AAE (anteriority, remoteness, or clause type) did not play a significant role. The second half of the study concerns multiple verb forms, especially the present perfect, described by previous studies as marginal or non-existent in AAE. In contrast, present perfect forms in this corpus are frequent and favoured by all the English-derived conditioning factors tested in this study: ambiguity of temporal orientation and relation, recent or continuing events, negation, extended time adverbials, and since clauses, as well as by non-statives. This conditioning, especially taken in concert with the variability of bare verb forms, suggests that the present perfect has long been part of AAE, with its rarity in other corpora due to genre-based differences in the frequency of contexts requiring its use. The study provides new evidence in the history of the development of African American varieties of English, as well as demonstrating the utility of variationist analysis in resolving problems of linguistic system membership. Combining variationist and comparative analytical methods, it places AAE within the context of the development of the English language.