"To talk the talk and walk the walk" is the central unifying thesis of this discussion. It contains the discourse codes used by folk speakers in the African American Vernacular English (referred to as AAVE) community. And it focuses on the linguistic features that mark that code. Having the mental acumen to talk the talk and the fortitude to walk the walk are traits that are highly respected in the AAVE community. When these traits are seen by the uninformed eye or the Eurocentric educational mindset of the wider community, they are frequently misunderstood, misread, misinterpreted, misused, and just plain missed altogether, linguistically and culturally. In fact, it is difficult to talk informedly about the AAVE culture without utilizing the language of that culture. And such is the dilemma in writing this paper: to talk about the language of the AAVE community while using the language of the wider community; as it is also a dilemma shared by AAVE students in their classes everyday: to think in the discourse styles of the AAVE community while explicating those thoughts in the style of the wider community. Therefore this discussion requires an active mental, cultural, and linguistic code-switching, the accomplished feat of any AAVE speaker who dares to leave the hood or the amen corner for the community outside. That too is at the heart of talking the talk and walking the walk.

The intent of this discussion is to examine the linguistic features of "talk" and "talkded," or "walk" and "walkded" in the social situation of the AAVE community by analyzing a question which concerns both the phonological and morphological features of these words. The phonological aspect of the question concerns pronunciation --"Is this occurrence of /dId/ an epenthetic or intrusive /d/ sound which attempts to accommodate the /t/ or /d/ sound assumed to be lost from the past tense and participle forms of the verb in AAVE speech? Epenthesis, also called intrusion, is a pronunciation phenomenon in which an extra sound is introduced into a word and that sound is not expected or not normally a part of that word (Crystal 1991, Lass 1984). A similar intrusion of the vowel /c/ in the pronunciation of ath-lete /æ› lit/ as ath-e-lete /æ›c lit/ occurs quite commonly among speakers of American English.

The morphological aspect of the question concerns the grammar of verb suffixes-- Is this occurrence of /dId/ a reduplication of the past tense and past participle -ed. Morphologically the ending -ed is a past tense ending. And it has been realized in this instance as a /d/ -ed or /dId/. This feature is called reduplicated because the linguist expects that the form for the past tense has been repeated in another form which closely resembles the expected form. This reduplicated form is, therefore, said to be relexified, that is, given another morphological form, as in -ded which is apparent here.

To one knowledgeable about the way language structures work-- such as an educator who has studied language variation and change-- or to one familiar with the language codes of a particularly community, it is obvious here that a phonological feature and a morphological feature have combined into a new form, a convergence of sound and meaning. To one untutored in such matters of structural variation, or to one unaccustomed to a community=s language codes , utterances such as this could be misjudged as language errors and their speakers mislabeled as linguistically incompetent. To inform and educate the latter and to perpetuate and sustain the former are primary among the goals set for workshops that I hold with in-service and pre-service teachers of English and the language arts. The following discussion explicates one means by which this knowledge deficit can be filled. It examines the phenomenon of the epenthetic /d/ and the reduplicated -ed, exemplified in talkded and walkded, within the cultural and linguistic perspectives of hypercorrection, decreolization, and code-switching. Which of these is it or is it all of them? If this form is a hypercorrection, is the source of it in decreolization or in code-switching?

Let's pause for a moment from the linguistic analysis and put the feature-- epenthetic /d/ merged with reduplicated -ed-- into a social situation from its native environment and examine it from that perspective.

Folk figures and vernacular speech

The following scenario involves folk figures and vernacular speech from the AAVE culture:

In an unfortunate set of circumstances not unfamiliar to ones taken to hanging together in disreputable places, two local acquaintances noted for their verbal wit engage in a flyting which ends badly due to a single act of cultural misunderstanding.

"Don' mess wit me, Blood! Stay OUT ma tree, or I'll cut ya too thin to boil and too thick to fry!" Billy Badass pops the words from his mouth as if tasting them as they spew toward Stagalee, meanwhile shufflin his feet and shoving his hands into his pockets in his usual "I'm ba-a-ad" manner. "Ah, man! you bad! you bad!" acquiesed Stagalee, taking a step back, away from Billy. Then pulling a nine from his coat, Stagalee growled, "But don' never bring no knife to a gun fight." and popped a cap in Billy's bad ass.

In the reporting that went around the hood about the incident, a very reliable source, Sista Sadie, was overheard telling her clients at the beauty shop. She tell them say "Lawd! Lawd! Ain' that just too bad!" Sista Sadie sighed, then continued her testifyin about the altercation, "Billy talkded the talk, but Stagalee walkded the walk."

That folk vignette illustrates several points about language codes in the African American community. Specifically about the spoken verbal codes.

In the AAVE culture, some call it "folk culture" (Holloway 1990, Joyner 1984), others call it "street culture" (Baugh 1983), the language defines the occasion. In this vignette, the folk figures and their language exemplify the discourse styles and language codes of the AAVE culture," On a locutionary level, where the act of saying is itself meaningful, this occasion is both a social situation and a speech event (Crystal 1991; Lyons 1977, Ch 16).

Billy and Stagalee are in a face-to-face conversation in the midst of a flyting, and Sista Sadie is an on-looker; the three are members of the same vernacular community, familiar with the same verbal codes. In AAVE culture, Billy is more mouth than nerve, Stagalee is more nerve than toleration, and Sista Sadie can read all that.

Billy's signifying braggadocio and Stagalee's cappin, figuratively and literally, fit the illocutionary codes of vernacular discourse in the speech event (Richardson 1996; Smitherman 1977). That is, Billy and Stagalee's utterances themselves act as performatives. According to Austin's How to Do Things with Words (1962), the speech event is composed of several significant components:

3. the correct and complete execution of a procedure (36), and

4. certain thoughts, feelings, or intentions (39).

Schiffren (1994, 30-31) explains further that an act can either misfire, that is, not go through at all, or it can go through but, due to an abuse of the procedure, it can go through in a way that is not totally satisfactory, as it just so happens in this speech event with Billy and Stagalee.

In this situation, Billy uses verbal signals to get Stagalee off his case, and Stagalee gives ground with verbal assent. So it wasn't Billy's talk that makes things go awry. The vernacular culture respects Billy's signifying ability and appreciates his way with words. But another message could be read in the actions which follow or accompany the words. Typically words alone are not enough to instigate. It was the inappropriateness of Billy's actions in the situation that led to Stagalee's response. Billy shoved his hands into his pockets, signaling a search for a weapon. Had he not done so, Stagalee would never have read him as meaning to fight. The verbal codes say "no fight intended, no fight taken." But the action codes say otherwise. Although Stagalee was willing to acquiesce in a flyting that Billy initiated and was so good at, he would not have taken it to the next level if Billy had not unwittingly sent another code when he nervously shoved his hands into his pocket.

"Billy Badass talkded the talk, but Stagalee walkded the walk."

When Sister Sadie reports on the event, her comment addresses the perlocutionary force of the speech event. The event is defined in the effect it has on her choice of codes to report to her social network in the African American community (Richardson, 1996; Lyons 1977 Vol II, Ch 16; Levinson, S. 1983,Ch.5). That force is captured in her use of the verbs "talkded" and "walkded." The pattern of these verbs differs phonologically and morphologically from the verbal pattern of both the speech code of the AAVE folk community and the code of the language of wider communicationBsometimes called standard English, referred to hereafter as LWC.

Epenthetic /d/BReduplicated -ed from the Community to the Classroom

The phenomenon of epenthetic /d/Breduplicated -ed can be heard everyday in the speech of adults and children from the AAVE community. A Marta policeman, a Black male approximately 50 years old, was heard to say about an appointment to plan for the Olympics, "I missded that meeting." A 27 year-old maintenance technician commented "It ruineded my brother when he took up with her." Most frequently heard in any other community speech situations are the pervasive lookded and likeded. "Man! Shorty sho lookded good to me!" (Af Am male college-aged youth to his friend). "I likeded him, but I couldn't let him know that" (Af Am female teenage youth).

Elementary school educators and university professors report the occurrence in the speech of their students and even notice effects of the phenomenon in their students' writing. "It lookded good to me" was said by a college freshman, and "I likeded it a lot" was said by both a college freshman and a first grader. In another instance, a first grader produced workded in an oral reading of the sentence "My mother worked hard." Immediately correcting himself, he then reread the sentence without the epenthetic /d/Breduplicated -ed but with a final /t/ which sounded more like a flapped stop (sounds like a click) than a clearly enunciated ploded stop /t/, not particularly easy to accomplish in the cluster environment formed with an immediately preceding voiceless stop. Apparently, the speaker used this form in a social situation which required "good" English, situations involving an audience of revered personage such as the teacher or professor for students. It also seems to be used in speech situations which involve more formal or serious subject matter or in which the speaker wants to make a forceful statement.

The effects of this spoken phenomenon of epenthetic /d/Breduplicated -ed can be seen also in the writing of college writers and of early learners. A second grader [Jm] wrote the following sentence in a spelling exercise in which the target word was "saw": "Did you saw my cat run[n]ing a crosst the s[t]reet?" The phonology of -ed is reflected in the t spelling. "Cross" is perceived as an action word. A university freshman wrote "[He] was accepted to attended [the university]." In this sentence, he wants to be sure that every past time meaning is accommodated in the verb forms of the sentence, a precaution he has surely been admonished to take by his English composition instructors. So the occurrence of this feature in the speech of AAVE speakers is more than a phonological consequence of compensating for final consonant sounds. It also have morphological consequences, for as is apparent, the spoken code is translated into codes of writing which interpret and sometimes restructure the forms to accommodate meaning. Thereby, the speaker who "talkded the talk" in their speech is also likely to "walkded the walk" in their writing.

Background of Linguistic Analysis

The background to this "talkded-walkded" phenomenon lies in the occurrence of phonological forms related to the kinds of morphological omissions that the university freshman has been warned against: the absence in AAVE words of consonant clusters in word-final position where they are expected in LWC words. Numerous linguists (Bailey and Thomas (1998), Stockman (1996), Wolfram (1994), Baugh (1983), Labov (1972), and Smitherman (1977) in their analyses and assessments of AAVE phonology refer to this occurrence as final consonant cluster reduction or consonant cluster simplification.

Language arts teachers note its persistence among their early learners despite more than a year of instruction in -ed and -d verb endings. On the other end of the educational spectrum, college composition instructors are even more chagrined. Perhaps, neither of these groups of teachers are aware of the correlation between the absence of the cluster in speech and the absence of the morpheme in writing. Figure 1, below, provides a visual explanation to make the parallels clearer.

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Figure 1. Final Consonant Cluster Simplification

Consonant clusters like -st in test, -sk in desk and -kt in walked and talked at the end of the word simplify or reduce to a single consonant. Test becomes tes and desk becomes des. In words like talked and walked, when the final sound is lost to reduction, so is the inflectional morpheme. The past tense and past participle endings are loss, and the English regular verbs like walked and talked become walk and talk. Their final /kt/ occur as /k/, having lost the final /t/ sound. Along with the reduction of /l/, this final consonant cluster simplification accords with Labov's (1972) rules for l and t, d deletion. In this phonological pattern, the past tense and past participle endings of English regular verbs like walked and talked become walk and talk, their final /kt/ occurring only as /k/ and having no final /t/ sound. Not only is pronunciation affected but the grammar of the verb is too. Because this ending also carries the meaning "past time," its absence might seem to indicate inconsistency or absence of tense morpheme, a grievous error in standard English.

Through the influence of popular attention and the efforts of some English language instruction to make a difference, many Blacks Bparticularly mesolectal speakers-- have become more sensitive to word endings and give more attention to them in their speech. "The same adults exhibit noticeable adjustments in their linguistic behavior in various situations" (Baugh 1983: 52). Mesolectal speakers have had experience of instruction in the suffix and verb endings, but because they maintain predominant contact in a speech community where the consonant cluster reduction is a regular occurrence, their speech may shift back and forth along a continuum which takes them in and out of that phonological structure. In this regard, Baugh comments that "Some dimensions of linguistic behavior, the typical conversations that ordinary people use as part of their day-to-day existence, change in a systematic way without conscious monitoring. People tend to know when they are being formal, but they are not fully aware of every nuance of these changes'(53). He adds that "at this level, people make slight subconscious adjustments" (53). In casual speech, the walk and talk forms appear: He walk the walk and talk the talk. But when the AAVE speaker communicates in a social situation in which the audience is a significant part of the importance of the message, the results may be "proper talk," in this case, a pronunciation that adds a full syllable /dId/--pronounced as in walkdid and talkdid--and in so doing, avoids the consonant cluster reduction and places emphasis on word-endings. The pronunciation sounds as though there is a double past tense morpheme. John Baugh (1983) calls the feature a reduplicated -ed.

Is this pronunciation overshooting the mark for standard English varieties and showing, therefore, the effects of hypercorrection? Or is this pronunciation an aspect of AAVE decreolization in the post-creole continuum? Perhaps it prompts a third question: is this pronunciation applying the phonological rules of a creolized language to those of standard English and thereby resulting in codeswitching? Phonologically the epenthetic /d/ otherwise called morphologically the reduplicated -ed may, at this juncture, be examined as caused by one or a combination of linguistic events: hypercorrection, decreolization, and/or codeswitching.

Epenthetic /d/ -- Reduplicated -ed as Hypercorrection

Hypercorrection is a term used in linguistics to refer to the movement of a linguistic form beyond the point set by the variety of language that a speaker has as a target. The phenomenon usually takes place when speakers of a non-standard dialect attempt to use the standard dialect and `go too far', producing a version which does not appear in the standard. Analogous behavior is encountered in second-language learning (Gumperz and Hymes 1972: Ch. 19).

Baugh (1983) explains hypercorrection in this way: often "vernacular speakers overshoot the mark when they produce their standard rendition, thereby making hypercorrrections, that is the utterance reflects an over-generalization of the standard English equivalent (for example, pickted versus picked). Hypercorrection, an important dimension of style shifting in street speech, has been discussed at some length by Labov and his colleagues Paul Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis (1968, 288.) and Walt Wolfram (1969) among others. The significant difference between hypercorrect forms, as opposed to other features of nonstandard street speech , is that they regularize the standard grammatical and /or phonological paradigms (33). But AAVE already has a regularized ending so that past time is accommodated in the context of the discourse and the absence of a word- final consonant cluster does not affect meaning.

A comparative examination of decreolization in regard to this feature adds a dimension which takes culture into account with language, creolization.

Epenthetic /d/ -- Reduplicated -ed as Decreolization

Some linguists view language contact as a leveling agent, causing a language spoken by few people to become more like the language spoken by many people with whom they interact, a process known as dialect leveling. Certainly that would be expected of AAVE with LWC and thus the possibility of hypercorection. According to Baugh (1983), "When two individuals who speak different dialects come together in a social situation, there may be a tendency to adjust speech in the direction of other interlocutors" (33). Baugh points out also that "attitudinal preferences can play a major role in the extent--direction--of dialect leveling" (33).

While dialect leveling is a temporary, event-driven shift in an individual's dialect patterns, decreolization is a longer-lasting, more frequently occurring shift in a group's dialect patterns. As in the case with Sista Sadie's "walkded" and "talkded", if this form were hers alone then it could be accounted for only by her empathy with the magnitude of the event, the social situation in which she is reporting it, and her role as the reporter of important news. But many such instances are accounted for in the AAVE community.

Somewhere on the continuum from AAVE lect (language variety) to LWC lect, Sista Sadie has developed another past tense form. She shifts to a form which falls between the rules for the two speech communities: the consonant cluster simplification and zero past tense morph rule of AAVE and the consonant cluster retaining and -ed past tense of the LWC.

But because this form is used by many AAVE speakers, not by just one individual, and because it occurs in many social occasions similar in importance, and because it is used, then this shift from one form to another is more than dialect leveling, it may be more like a process of language change. A change similar to the process of decreolization. A decreolization change develops when one lect, is changing to become more like another lect (predominant variety) which has the greater social influence. This change follows the patterns of change exemplified in creole languages such as Guyanese creole, Krio, and Gullah. Creole is a term used in sociolinguistics to refer to a language which has in most cases descended from a pidgin language or from major structural and lexical transformations to a language because of prolonged contact and interaction with another language. That newly derived language becomes the mother-tongue of a speech community, as is the case in Jamaica, Haiti, Dominica, and in several other ex-colonial parts of the world (Arends, Muysken, Smith 1995; Todd 1984).

The process of creolization expands the structural and stylistic range of the pidginized language, such that the creolized language becomes comparable in formal and functional complexity to other languages. A process of decreolization takes place when the standard language begins to exert influence on the creole, and a post-creole continuum emerges. (Trudgill 1984: Chps 3 and 7).

Because AAVE is derived from creole based languages, that is, it developed from Western and Central African languages, with Portuguese and then prolonged English contacts, it maintains many of the characteristics of a creole. Phonological similarities between AAVE and creole languages can be seen in the Guyanese Creole and the Krio (of Liberia) arrangements of consonants and vowels. In Figure 2, below, their patterning reveals a C V (Consonant-Vowel) or a CVC (Consonant -Vowel- Consonant) alternation:

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Figure 2. Phoneme patterns in creole languages

Notice a similarity in the AAVE walk and walkded illustrated below in Figure 3, They share the CVC phoneme alternation of the creole. Another common feature of creoles, according to Crystal ("Pidgins and Creoles", 1994), is the use of particles to replace tenses and the use of repeated forms to intensify, also illustrated in the sound patterning of the reduplicated -ed in Figure 3:

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Figure 3: Post-Creole Continuum

Crystal (1994) states further that the conflict between a creole and the language from which it derived is that the Astandard language has the status which comes with social prestige, education, and wealth; the creole has no such status, its roots lying in a history of subservience and slavery. Incontrovertibly, creole speakers find themselves under great pressure to change their speech in the direction of the standard--a process known as decreolization.

One consequence of this is the emergence of a continuum of several varieties of creole speech, at varying degrees of linguistic "distance" from the standard, thus the post creole continuum (Crystal 565) illustrated above in Figure 3..

Even though the sound patterns and the /dId/ morpheme which approximates a particle are similar to creoles, one fact still raises a question. The uninflected CVC pattern co-occurs with inflected CVC-CVC pattern within the speech of the same speaker. While co-occurrence is not uncommon in a community because of age and social status differences, it is uncommon and unlikely in one individual within the community. Hence this co-occurrence suggests possibilities for code-switching.

Epenthetic /d/ -- Reduplicated -ed as Code-Switching

The general sense of the term "code," used in this discussion of epenthetic /d/ -- reduplicated -ed, is as a set of conventions for converting from one signaling system to another signaling system (Crystal 1991). This linguistic behavior, referred to as code-switching can be illustrated, for example, by the switch bilingual or bidialectal speakers may make (depending on who they are talking to, or where they are), between standard and regional or ethnic forms of English or between occupational and domestic varieties. Thus the co-occurrence of tense-marked verbs and in AAVE along side tense-unmarked verbs.

Several sociologists and sociolinguists have given `code' a more restricted definition. the most widespread special use of the term is in the theory of communication codes propounded by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein (b. 1924). His distinction between elaborated and restricted codes was part of a theory of the nature of social systems, concerned in particular with the kinds of meanings people communicate, and how explicitly they do this, using the range of resources provided by the language. (For more discussion on this subject, see Gumperz and Hymes 1972: Chs 1, 17; Bolinger and Sears 1981: Chs 7,9; Lyons 1977: Ch. 14.)

As an AAVE speaker, it is expected that Sadie would use the uninflected "talk" -"walk" forms for review of community events, yet she chooses instead another form also associated with the AAVE community. Sista Sadie understands both the verbal and the nonverbal speech codes of the community. She utilizes the code which matches the situation of the message. In her statement "Stagalee walkded the walk," she is articulating the shift from one code to another. So "talking the talk" is one code in a speech event and "walking the walk" is another. Sadie=s speech codes converge with her knowledge of the social communication codes. She uses a form which identifies her as part of the AAVE community--the inflected epenthetic /d/Breduplicated -ed (the CVC-CVC pronunciation), yet its use places her beyond the expected variety of AAVE verbal code-- the uninflected forms (the CVC pronunciation) Band announces or stresses her position of knowledge in the communication event.

Conclusion

About the phenomenon epenthetic /d/Breduplicated -ed , several conclusions may be evident. AAVE speakers may use the form "talkded" and "walkded" which illustrates the characteristics of hypercorrection in the direction of an LWC lect or standard English variety to fit the magnitude of the occasion. It is also apparent from phonological patterning that the form maintains features which link it to a creole linguistic heritage through recreolization. This creole-like reduplication develops in AAVE a syllabic morpheme which bears a characteristic common to particles, again, suggesting recreolization. Epenthetic /d/Breduplicated -ed may indeed by a hypercorrection as Baugh suggests, but it is most certainly an AAVE community identifier. Maybe we will have to call it a hyper-creolization, a form which moves toward the LWC form while maintaining characteristics of its linguistic heritage.

Finally, AAVE speakers who use the forms may not be aware of this phenomenon nor aware of it as a linguistic feature that marks the language code of their community. But it is certainly the case that educators of African American children on all levels must acquire a knowledge of the linguistic features which mark the language codes of the AAVE community, in order that they may not misunderstand, misread, misinterpret, nor misuse the traits of that community, linguistically or culturally, in the instruction of the language of wider communication. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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