General extenders and stuff like that in African American Language
Despite the widespread attention to General Extenders (GEs) over the past 40 years, none of the previous studies have investigated their use, function, and possible grammaticalization in African American Language (AAL). This study aims to fill that gap with a replication study following the methods used in Tagliamonte and Denis (2010) and Denis (2017). The data come from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) (Kendall and Farrington 2018). GEs were extracted from transcripts of all 146 speakers in CORAAL yielding a total of 1,661 forms. We found the distribution of GEs patterns similarly to what Tagliamonte and Denis (2010) found in Toronto, and when we tested the CORAAL data for the four features of grammaticalization outlined in Cheshire (2007) we found only minor differences for phonetic reduction. GE data from other AAL corpora should reveal if these results can be generalized to other regional varieties of AAL.
References Cheshire, Jenny. 2007. Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11: 155-193. Denis, Derek. 2017. The Development of and stuff in Canadian English: A longitudinal study of apparent grammaticalization. Journal of English Linguistics 45: 157-185. Kendall, Tyler and Charlie Farrington. 2018. The Corpus of Regional African American Language. Version 2018.10.06. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project. Tagliamonte, Sali and D. Denis. 2010. The stuff of change: General extenders in Toronto, Canada. Journal of English Linguistics 38: 335-368.
