Grammatical features of African American Vernacular English in Lyrics and Interviews of $uicideboy$ : BA thesis

Abstract

This paper aims to add to the discussion on the usage of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) by non-African-Americans, specifically white rappers. This discussion is valuable, as it may help to understand the current status of AAVE in the US and elsewhere, as AAVE seems to have spread to different ethnic communities beyond the African American ones. As rap and hip-hop culture have played a major role in this, this thesis focuses on the white rapper duo – $uicideboy$. The proposition of this thesis is that $uicideboy$ employ more grammatical features of AAVE in their song lyrics than in their interview speech, demonstrating that AAVE usage in their lyrics might have been a conscious decision. Thus, the results of this paper can also contribute to the understanding of rap music as a linguistic register and ascertain the linguistic devices employed in this register. First, this paper discusses the history of AAVE and presents the features to be used in the analysis. Among other things, it explores the definitions of rap and hip-hop, as well as register and genre. Then, the corpus-based analysis of the grammatical features, conducted with the help of such tools as UNIX and Whisper, is presented and discussed in detail.