A Comparative Study of the Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Features of African American Vernacular English in East Coast vs. West Coast Style Rap

This dissertation studies African American Vernacular English (AAVE, henceforth) found in the East Coast style rap (ECSR, henceforth) and the West Coast style rap (WCSR, henceforth), which are two varieties of AAVE. This dissertation is aimed at looking for all the sub-features that fall under three major features of AAVE – tense & aspect marking feature, negation feature, and pronoun feature in the two AAVE varieties and compare them. In this way, two databases have been created in this dissertation for the two AAVE varieties – ECSR and WCSR respectively. Both qualitative method and quantitative methods have been applied to this dissertation, in which the qualitative method is used to identify and analyze the data and the descriptive quantitative method is used to calculate the percentage of each feature found in the databases. As for the conclusion, first off, there is a group of sub-features found in both databases that have been built for this dissertation. Take a closer look at the sub-features found in both databases – as for the tense & aspect marking sub-features, there are some sub-features that show up extremely similar amount of times in both databases, i.e. the usage of got, gots, and gotta, while there are some other sub-features, i.e. done + verb (past tense form), differ largely in terms of how many times it has showed up in both databases; in the negation sub-features, both databases have exactly the same sub-features, which are the usage of ain’t, double negation, and the usage of don’t, out of which the usage of ain’t has become the most often used negation sub-feature in both databases; in the pronoun sub-features, there is only one sub-feature that two databases have in common, which is the usage of y’all, which has shown up a bit more in the WCSR database than the ECSR database.