Tracy Conner

The following interview was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2021. By that time, I had known John Baugh for about eighteen years after having taken my first class on Black English with him at Stanford. I have always been fascinated by John’s ability to merge innovative and culturally relevant, justice-focused research with liberatory outcomes for Black people and Black language. It was a rare treat for me to talk with my long-time mentor now as a faculty member. In the wake of finally having a critical mass of Black scholars in linguistics and after George Floyd’s murder and a new push to decolonize linguistics, it only seemed fitting to hear the experiences that shaped John’s life, the life of a Black man in linguistics, and how that life has given rise to his groundbreaking scholarship. There is nothing linear about his path. And as the field pushes to admit more Black graduate students and hire more Black faculty, it dawned on me that many in the field migh...

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has played an important part in the theorization of how speaking styles relate to individual identity, to interactional dynamics, and to wider social structures and ideologies. The present study illustrates some of the subtle dynamics of AAVE style-shifting in a single individual, showcasing an interplay of layered social meanings.
Decades of research on style variation in AAVE have progressively refined our understanding of these layers of social meaning. In Labov’s early work on AAVE (1969, 1972: 265), for example, differences in how much both core and peripheral members of Black adolescent peer groups controlled their use of AAVE across situations reflected their group’s oppositional or aligned stance towards the dominant White society in New York City. Later, in a widely known investigation of Bell’s Audience Design model (1984), Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994a) studied variability across interviews with one AAVE speaker, Foxy Boston, and found a number of patterns that both supported and further elaborated Bell’s model. Foxy Boston’s style-shifting was shown to be sensitive to conversation topic and to addressee, with the latter exerting a greater influence and thus confirming one of Bell’s predictions. Her speech also varied when it was directed to the same addressee on different occasions (Rickford and McNair-Knox 1994a: 264), an observation that was expanded substantially in a more recent longitudinal exploration of her speech over two decades (Rickford and Price 2013b). Many other studies have explored further dimensions of style variation and range in AAVE (e.g., Sweetland 2002; Alim 2004; Van Hofwegen and Wolfram 2010; Guy and Cutler 2011). In a close analysis of one female preacher’s use of AAVE, Kortenhoven (2017) integrates many earlier insights with more recent theories of indexicality and persona construction (Eckert 2012).
The present article engages closely with Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994a) and Kortenhoven (2017) by investigating methods for tracking audience and other effects within the highly structured speech event of a sermon. It uses a new metric of real-time style alternation to observe how layers of social meaning unfold in discourse.

Current theories of ellipsis share the assumption that ellipsis is licensed by the presence of a licensing feature, [E], on a functional node in syntax (Lobeck 1995, Merchant 1999, 2004). This dissertation provides evidence from both Mainstream American English (MAE) and African American English (AAE) that the functional heads that license ellipsis must be phonologically overt, which is unexpected under current theories. AAE is particularly important to establish this generalization due to the fact that, although the pronunciation of auxiliary be and the possessive 's morpheme is typically optional preceding a full predicate, new experimental evidence reported in this dissertation shows that this optionality disappears in elliptical contexts. This shows that predicate ellipsis can only be licensed in an Agree relation established between a phonologically realized functional morpheme and the lexical phrase it c-commands. I argue that the functional morphemes that license predicat...

Current theories assume that all ellipsis phenomena can be licensed by a feature occupying a preceding functional head (Lobeck 1995, Merchant 1999, 2004). In this paper, however, I show that feature-based treatments cannot account for licensing of verb phrase and noun phrase ellipsis (predicate ellipsis) in American English and African American English (AAE) through evidence that these functional heads must be phonologically overt. AAE is particularly important to establish this generalization due to the fact that production of auxiliary be and the possessive ’s morpheme is typically optional preceding a full predicate, yet experimental evidence from this paper confirms that this optionality disappears in elliptical contexts. The analysis proposed here entails that predicate ellipsis, inwhich overtness is required, and clausal ellipsis,wherein the head said to license ellipsis is necessarily silent, are subject to different licensing conditions.

Current theories assume that all ellipsis phenomena can be licensed by a feature occupying a preceding functional head (Lobeck 1995, Merchant 1999, 2004). In this paper, however, I show that feature-based treatments cannot account for licensing of verb phrase and noun phrase ellipsis (predicate ellipsis) in American English and African American English (AAE) through evidence that these functional heads must be phonologically overt. AAE is particularly important to establish this generalization due to the fact that production of auxiliary be and the possessive ’s morpheme is typically optional preceding a full predicate, yet experimental evidence from this paper confirms that this optionality disappears in elliptical contexts. The analysis proposed here entails that predicate ellipsis, inwhich overtness is required, and clausal ellipsis,wherein the head said to license ellipsis is necessarily silent, are subject to different licensing conditions.