Stress, pitch, intonation and phonotactic patterns

In informal speech, AAVE speakers often move the stress to the first syllable of a word which in StAmE carries stress on some other syllable. This usually occurs in, but is not restricted to, bisyllabic words, the first syllable of which is open, as in police ['poˌlis], Detroit ['diˌtroɪt] , and Tennessee ['tε, nə, si]. In very informal speech, AAVE speakers use fore- stressing frequently. Thus, words like define, produce, revise and detain are often fore- stressed in the vernacular (Baugh 1983: 63). Intonational stress in sentences often carries meaning. For example, if [bɪn] is not stressed, it does not signify remote past as it does in sentences where it is stressed.

Studies to determine if the unique intonation contours occurring in AAVE are associated with specific sentence types have found that yes-no questions sometimes omit the final rise, often using a level or falling contour at the end of the question (Green 2002; Tarone 1972, 1973).

According to Tarone (1972, 1973), AAVE speakers frequently employ a wide pitch range, often using the falsetto register to signal various modalities, including anger, humor, or skepticism. However, this area is poorly studied, and has not been formally linked to pitch and tone patterns of West African languages (Green 2002).

Word-final clusters such as sk and nd are frequently produced as s and n. Thus, mask may be pronounced [mæs] and land may be pronounced [læn]. Two competing theories for the origin of this phenomenon exist. The first approach claims this occurs because of a robust deletion rule of consonant clusters. The Africanist approach claims the “missing” consonant to be nonexistent because West African languages do not have word-final clusters, and in certain environments (such as before a word-initial vowel) the final consonant is added to the following lexical item. Again, the details of these theories will not be debated here. It should be noted that this phenomenon occurs for many different clusters, including ld, sp, kd, ft, and so on (Green 2002).