This study is a field survey of the dialect of the Black college students of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. The data were gathered from hundreds of students over a period of eight years. The verifying data were taken from a group of fifty subjects who completed five different information-gathering instruments. These instruments included fifty sentences which the students wrote from dicatation, and read into a tape recorder. The subjects also wrote from dictation twenty-five sentences and read these sentences into a tape recorder. The subjects also taped a one-page story. All instruments were composed by the researcher and were designed to elicit dialectal deviations which had previously been noted in the examples taken from the students' free expression writing. The fifty subjects also responded to demographic questionnaires.This study is divided into three different sections, morphology, phonology, and syntax.Under morphology are two sections which deal with the leveling of inflections, the [-S] inflections on nouns and the third person verb, and the [-d] inflections on the past tense and past participle.The examples from the free expression writing of the primary population, and the fifty subjects, and the tabulation of the data from the other instruments, show clearly that leveling of these inflections is a true feature of the dialect of the population.The section on phonology demonstrates the lack of phonemic differentiation between the pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants, confusion between other consonants and consonant blends, and the shifting of certain vowel sounds.Included under phonology are two other sections, the first dealing with intrusive letters and sounds, notably an r, phonetically r , and the second dealing with deleted letters and sounds, including medial sounds, and the deletion of ending consonants.The third section notes five syntactical deviations from Standard English, the embedded question, the use of be to substitute for am, are, is, was, and will be, the 0 copula, the substitution of it for there, and the substitution of until for that.This study is a field survey only. It categorizes dialect items, but makes no comparison with any other survey of dialect, nor attempts any explanation, historical or otherwise, for the items presented here.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/176591 |
| Date | 03 June 2011 |
| Creators | Hanners, LaVerne |
| Contributors | Thornburg, Thomas R. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | 2, 194 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
| Coverage | n-us-ar |
Page generated in 0.0017 seconds