Readings

• Bastard Tongues, chapt. 3
• "Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence" [1] by Bill Labov

Linguistic Concepts

• African American Vernacular English [2]
  
  

  African American Vernacular English (AAVE) – also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular (BEV), or Black Vernacular English (BVE) – is an African American variety (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of American English. Controversially, non-linguists sometimes call it Ebonics (a term that also has other meanings or strong connotations) or jive (which can mean the slang of AAVE and/or the signifying for which AAVE is famous). Its pronunciation is in some respects common to Southern American English, which is spoken by many African Americans and many non-African Americans in the United States. There is little regional variation among speakers of AAVE. Several creolists, including William Stewart, John Dillard, and John Rickford, argue that AAVE shares so many characteristics with Creole dialects spoken by black people in much of the world that AAVE itself is a creole. It has been suggested that AAVE has grammatical structures in common with West African languages or even that AAVE is best described as an African based language with English words. Speakers of AAVE are typically bidialectal. As with all linguistic forms, its usage is influenced by age, status, topic and setting. There are many literary uses of this variety of English, particularly in African-American literature.

• Pidgin and Creole Languages [3]
  

  Originally thought of as incomplete, broken, corrupt, not worthy of serious attention. Pidgins still are marginal: in origin (makeshift, reduced in structure), in attitudes toward them (low prestige); in our knowledge of them. Some quick definitions:

  1. Pidgin language (origin in Engl. word `business'?) is nobody's native language; may arise when two speakers of different languages with no common language try to have a makeshift conversation. Lexicon usually comes from one language, structure often from the other. Because of colonialism, slavery etc. the prestige of Pidgin languages is very low. Many pidgins are `contact vernaculars', may only exist for one speech event.
     
  2. Creole (orig. person of European descent born and raised in a tropical colony) is a language that was originally a pidgin but has become nativized, i.e. a community of speakers claims it as their first language. Next used to designate the language(s) of people of Caribbean and African descent in colonial and ex-colonial countries (Jamaica, Haiti, Mauritius, Réunion, Hawaii, Pitcairn, etc.)
     
  3. Relexification The process of substituting new vocabulary for old. Pidgins may get relexified with new English vocabulary to replace the previous Portuguese vocabulary, etc.

  Read the whole handout... [4]

• Pidgins and Creoles
  
  

Examples

• Tok Pisin
  
  

Exercises

People

• Ferdinand de Saussure [5] and the Semiotic Princple:
  
  

  Saussure's most influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye on the basis of notes taken from Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva. The Course became one of the seminal linguistics works of the 20th century, not primarily for the content (many of the ideas had been anticipated in the works of other 19th century linguists), but rather for the innovative approach that Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena.
  
  Its central notion is that language may be analyzed as a formal system of differential elements, apart from the messy dialectics of real-time production and comprehension. Examples of these elements includes the notion of the linguistic sign, the signifier, the signified, and the referent.