The manifestation of agrammatism in a bidialectal speaker of African -American vernacular English and standard American English.

摘要

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a particularly interesting dialect relative to Standard American English (SAE). Some obligatory features in SAE are produced optionally in AAVE (e.g., plural /Z/), resulting in speech that may appear similar to that of agrammatic SAE speakers. The first goal of this project was to distinguish the agrammatic features of a bidialectal AAVE-SAE speaker with agrammatism from those that may simply reflect RAVE dialect patterns. The first study employed Seymour's (1998) categorization schema to demonstrate that indeed, numerous utterances can be deemed agrammatic rather than dialectal.;In addition, three features of AAVE in which functors are employed more frequently than, or differently from, SAE were identified for experimental testing: habitual be, plural /Z/, and multiple negatives. Three experiments were set up to have the were particularly problematic for the participant. Moreover, because the piloting suggested that the participant's use of plural /Z/ fell within the normal range for a bidialectal AAVE/SAE speaker, the sixth study of this dissertation reanalyzed a subset of Meth's 1998 data that included the same participant producing 3rd person /Z/ and, by way of comparison, past-tense /D/.;Initially, unbound functors that are distributed differently in AAVE and SAE were investigated. It was observed that the habitual be is spared as are a number of negative elements, but not negative contractions. Monosyllabic words with negative contraction affixes posed particular problems, but another form of inflection, plural, did not. Concerning bound affixes, Meth's (1998) data that included the same participant producing SAE verb inflections, revealed that the participant employs an affix for third person /Z/ more than for past tense /D/. Additionally, the use of suffixes or zero affix is not randomly distributed; rather, the zero affix is more likely to occur with phonologically "harder" items: multisyllabic stems and ones ending in consonant clusters. Such a pattern was consistent with what Meth (1998) reported for SAE monodialectal speakers.;One may conclude that the aphasic speakers of AAVE-SAE can be identified by the same criteria used for SAE and other languages such as the reduction in the use of functors, omissions and substitutions of inflectional markers and telegraphic speech with the relative sparing of content words. On two points the participant's data differed interestingly from what would be expected from the extensive agrammatism literature: his spared use of habitual be and his specific problems with negative contractions.