Middle-Class African American English

“…and other rhetorical genres) features of the African American speech community and its social variation and change over the years (e.g., Baugh, 1983, 1999; L. J. Green, 2002; Lanehart, 2015; Morgan, 2002; Mufwene et al., 2021; Rickford & Rickford, 2000; Smitherman, 1977, 2000, 2006; Weldon, 2021).”

“Following [12, 13], our team looked for morphological, syntactic, and (typewritten) phonological features, rhetorical features (e.g. he ain’t shit), and camouflaged language (e.g. he came in here talking about X , see [35, 36].”

“…utterance 1629, “They woulda BIN got rid of Derrick Rose” which is realized with a pattern much like the sample BIN F0 contours in Weldon (2019, 2021) of Sound Files 5.1 and 5.2 in Weldon (2021): it begins with a steep falling F0 contour onto BIN , which is followed by no other visible F0 peaks.”

“…in the absence of AAE morphosyntactic features, people can still discern when speech is coming from a Black individual, as evidenced by the growing body of research on the prosodic and intonational features of AAE (Holliday, 2021; Holliday & Villarreal, 2020; Thomas & Reaser, 2004; Weldon, 2021).”

“…gender (Craig & Grogger 2012, Rickford & Price 2013), geographic region (Holt 2018, Rickford et al. 2015), and SES background (Horton-Ikard 2006, Horton-Ikard & Miller 2004, Weldon 2021) and serves a pragmatic function of including or excluding individuals from these identities (Eckert 2019).”

“This means that naming and learning about UBSL concretized what they already intuited about USBL and gave them a stronger sense of confidence or authority in their understanding while enacting their desires to employ historical and innovative features of AAWL in performative ways (Weldon, 2021).”

“The third trend looks at AAVE as a legitimate language with a strong linguistic and stylistic tradition in verbal and written communication (Hankerson, 2022; Perryman-Clark, 2013; Weldon, 2021).”

“More recently, Weldon (2021) studied middle-class African American adults as a participant observer, and her studies reveal a far more complex linguistic landscape than that described by either Labov or Dillard.”

“…play, but part of their bodily experience, a constant reckoning with every academic space they entered, what previous scholars have characterized as linguistic double consciousness (i.e., linguistic “push-pull”) (Christian & Gayle, 2022; Rickford, 2000; Smitherman, 2006; Weldon, 2021; Young, 2009).”

“…grupo heterógeñeó no solo cultural sino tambieñ liñgüísticameñte, algo apreciable en que no todos utilizan AAVE (Green 2002: 1; Lippi-Green 2012: 186; Rickford 1999c: 323; Weldon 2021: 21), siendo tal variedad incluso empleada por personas no afroamericanas (Lippi-Green 2012: 186; Weldon 2021: 20).”

“The top pitch track shows a clear f0 peak on BIN, while the bottom shows a higher f0 before BIN and a much smaller peak on BIN (also noted in [5] and [6]).”

“” Despite this, Weldon (2021) noted that TH-stopping represented a “high risk, high reward” scenario: speakers are stigmatized for using the feature, but its strong association with Black identity provides covert prestige vis-à-vis solidarity with other speakers of the variety.”