A Linguistic Analysis of Change or Stability of Morphosyntactic and Phonological Features in African American English

The primary focus of modern sociolinguistics examines language variation and change between groups and over time. Eckert & Labov (2017) credit a variety of social behaviors – social meaning – as a primary motivator for language change. Given this notion, this thesis tests the hypothesis that morphosyntactic features remain more stable over region and time compared to phonological features, which are more available to carry social meaning. Two phonological and two morphosyntactic features from interviews in the SLAAP corpus were tabulated to help to gauge change and/or stability. The study’s results found insignificant differences between feature types, suggesting that revised approaches to linguistic data collection may provide clearer conclusions regarding linguistic featural stability or change. Variations in frequency of feature usage between the datasets demonstrates linguistic featural variability at the individual level. Evidenced limited opportunities for morphosyntactic features to occur suggests that features with layered meanings are more constrained by the grammar.