A SPOKEN CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF THE VERB PHRASE FEATURES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH (AAVE)

There are so many group with different language, which is what is called language
variation. The phenomenon of language variation is created due to social and cultural
interactions. In the scope of English, the phenomenon of language variation is the
existence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This study analyzed
grammatical features of AAVE in Verb Phrase Features area which are used by
native speakers or AAVE people when speaking to convey information. The aims of
this research were to find out what AAVE Verb Phrase Features appear in interviews,
and to prove that this research represents AAVE as the language being analyzed and
that AAVE Verb Phrase Features do exist and are used by native speakers. This
research used a research design Corpus Based-Analysis, with descriptive methods. A
Compilation Corpus linguistic approach was used to collect data. The data in this
research are utterances containing verb phrases obtained from transcripts of five
interviews obtained from ORAAL (Online Resources of African American
Language). Data were categorized by referring to ten categories from Walfram
(2006). The first findings showed that there were eight types of AAVE verb phrase
features that appear, namely Copula absence, Invariant be, Compelative done,
Remote been, Simple past had + verb, Irregular verb, Subject-verb agreement, and
the use of Ain't, Gonna, and say for quotation. The second finding showed that this
research has represented the language studied and the theory used about the
characteristics of the AAVE language, this was proven by the emergence of eight of
the ten categories offered in the theory, and the level of naturalness of the objects or
data analyzed.
Keywords: African-American English, African-American vernacular English,
Grammatical Features Analysis, Verb Phrase Features Analysis, Standard English,
Sociolinguistics, Interview, Corpus Ling