Description
Book SynopsisThe history, linguistic structure, and survival within white society of black street speech, based on a long-term study of adult speakers.
Trade ReviewA first-rate book by a noted sociolinguist.... This well-bound book with an excellent bibliography and index is clearly written in a comprehensible academic style. Highly recommended. * Choice *
Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1. Introduction: Street Speech as a Social Dialect
- 2. The Birth of Black Street Speech
- 3. Street Speech and Formal Speech: Linguistic Survival in Black and White Societies
- 4. The Scholar and the Street: Collecting the Data
- 5. Specialized Lexical Marking and Alternation
- Code Switching versus Style Shifting
- Topic-Related Shifting
- Syllable Contraction and Expansion
- Variable Forestressing of Bisyllabic Words
- Hypercorrection
- Lexical Summary
- 6. Unique Grammatical Usage
- Locating Suitable Examples
- Syntactic Constructions and Their Functions
- Grammatical Summary
- 7. Phonological Variation
- Suffix /-s/ Variation
- Consonant Cluster Reduction
- Is and Are Variation
- Postvocalic /r/ Variation
- Summary of Phonological and Morphological Variation
- 8. Educational Insights
- 9. Impediments to Employability
- 10. Dynamic Black Speech: A Nonideal Linguistic State
- Bibliography
- Index
