AAVE vs UE / AAVE corpus

[Kristen Precht]

Collegues --

I have recently heard AAVE called Urban English -- is anyone else familiar
with this new title?  Has it made it into any publications that you've seen?

Also -- I am in the process of making inquiries into collecting a corpus of
AAVE.  Such a project would involve collecting spoken texts (those in
existence or otherwise), and preparing them for the types of research
projects that they might be used for.  I am currently looking for potential
advisors and collaborators on the project.  This corpus might be used to
examine grammatical or lexical phenomena across a large database of language
that is tagged for context, speaker background features, and other features
of interest to those involved in the project.  I believe such a resource
would be a valuable contribution to the field; I have been involved in
corpus analyses of non-native speakers, British speakers, American speakers,
and it seems an incredible pity that more corpora of AAVE are not currently
available.

Comments?

Kristen Precht
Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics
Department of English
Kent State University
kprecht at kent.edu <mailto:kprecht at kent.edu>