Sintaxe em Foco

Um Estudo dos Sintagmas Mais Recorrentes na Oralidade do Inglês Afro-Americano

Abstract

In the sociolinguistics area focused on African-American English (AAE), some studies generally point out its context of use as well as the characteristics of the speakers of this dialect (Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015). As a result, these studies end up neglecting micro-linguistic issues of a syntactic structural characteristic (Burton-Roberts, 2022), contributing to a limitation of the literature on this issue. Therefore, considering the syntactic-structural characteristics of AAE (Green, 2002) as well as other American dialects (Schilling & Wolfram , 2016), this article aims to investigate the syntactic characteristics of verbal syntagms used in AAE orality. This investigation started with the identification, followed by the description and finally the systematic categorization of the syntactic characteristics of the verbal syntagms used in a speech context.For this purpose, excerpts from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) were analyzed. In this corpus, it is possible to track various spoken and written contexts through its search tool. The verbal phrases analyzed included the aspectual be and the element aint’t. As a result, their most recurrent syntactic characteristics were: double negation, ellipsis of auxiliary verbs, and the neutrality of verbal phrases in the tense-aspect category.