Syntactic Structure Of African American Vernacular English

The thesis uses the linguist Chomsky's syntactic rules of transformational grammar to analyze the syntactic structural features of African American Vernacular English (hereafter AAVE) via the carrier of Uncle Tom's Cabin movie subtitles from the angle of linguistics.The movie Uncle Tom's Cabin is adapted from the well-known novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. It reflects the African Americans'lives before the American Civil War. It is abundant with AAVE. So, to choose it as the object of research is feasible and realistic.Syntax refers to the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language, or simply, the study of the formation of sentences. Since sentence is usually regarded as the largest grammatical unit of a language, and the composition of sentence must adhere to syntactic structure rigidly, syntax has long been the center of grammatical study. Among the approaches to syntax, Chomsky's transformational and generative rules are important and representative. He made a distinction between two levels of a sentence structure, deep structure and surface structure. Different surface structures may have the same deep structure and different deep structures may also have the same surface structure.The thesis analyzes the surface structure of AAVE in the subtitles of the movie Uncle Tom's Cabin with the use of Chomsky's syntactical rules firstly. Through the analysis, the paper indicates that there exists divergence between AAVE and White Standard English on the surface structure. After a series of operations were made on the surface structure of AAVE, the thesis draws such a conclusion: AAVE and White Standard English express the same deep semantic structure though they have different surface structures.Compared with White Standard English, the surface structure of AAVE has the following features:1) the omission of components; 2) the change of components;3) the duplication of components;4) the reversal of components sequence.So, correspondingly, the operations of these surface structures are:1) the complements of components;2) the change of components;3) the deletion of components;4) the rearranging sequence of components.This supplies a new perspective to research AAVE in the future.