“Sounding black” vs. “talking black”?: Racial identity performance at different levels of variation
This study examines interaction between use of selected morphosyntactic and intonational features of AAL as conditioned by interlocutor. Building on Holliday (2016), which found a relationship between how much biracial participants identify as black and greater use of AAL intonational features, this study examines the same corpus for morphosyntactic features of AAL including zero copula, negative concord, and invariant be across interlocutor conditions. An lmer model was conducted using lme4 package in R to test for differences in rate of use of features across participants and interlocutor conditions. Participants use few morphosyntactic features (N per speaker= 8.14 features). Despite low numbers, models indicate participants use most morphosyntactic features in black friend condition, followed by biracial interviewer condition (p<.001) and white friend condition (p<.001). This demonstrates interlocutor effects on use of AAL morphosyntactic features despite no correlation with intonational features, indicating speakers may use intonation independently of morphosyntax for identity construction.
