A Corpus-Assisted Study Of African American Vernacular English And Black Identity In The Color Purple

Written in an epistolary form and featuring a significant amount of African American Vernacular English(AAVE),Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is a canon of African-American women literature and exposes the many challenges faced by African Americans in areas such as race,gender,and identity,while also showcasing the resilience and resistance of African Americans in the face of these challenges.As a result,The Color Purple is not only of great significance in the fields of literature and cultural studies but also has a high value in the field of linguistics.Previous research on The Color Purple has relied mainly on qualitative textual analysis or quantitative analysis of stylistic features,ignoring the intersection between linguistics,literature,and cultural studies.Therefore,this interdisciplinary study will adopt a corpus-assisted approach to explore the main features of AAVE and its role in constructing black identity in the novel.This study seeks to address the following research questions: 1)What are the major features of the literary AAVE used in The Color Purple? 2)Why do Alice Walker and many other well-educated African American writers use AAVE which differs from Standard English in their literary work? 3)How is black identity constructed,retrieved,or developed by the protagonists in The Color Purple,and what role does AAVE play in this process?This interdisciplinary study adopts a synergy of quantitative and qualitative research methods.Quantitative research relies on corpus linguistics,using The Color Purple as a corpus and online tools such as CLAWS,self-coding regular expressions,and corpus retrieval software Ant Conc 4.2.0 as the main research instruments to identify and generalize the phonological and grammatical features of AAVE in the novel.It aims to reveal AAVE’s importance,authenticity,and typicality in portraying African American literature.At the same time,it analyzes the collocation strength,context,plot,and dispersion of three terms related to black identity(black,colored,Africa*)to provide scientific data support for qualitative research.Qualitative research relies on critical discourse analysis and combines Stuart Hall’s cultural identity research theory with the quantitative data obtained from corpus retrieval to reveal the process of black identity recognition and self-affirmation through analyzing the semantic and discourse prosody related to black identity terms in the novel.The major findings of this research include 1)the identification of 23 distinct phonological and grammatical features of AAVE with a total of 3624 occurrences,highlighting the significance of AAVE for character delineation and representation of the African American community;2)the fluidity and complexity of black identity in the novel,as evidenced by the transformation of key identity terms black,colored,and Africa*;3)the integral role of AAVE in the process of black identity construction in The Color Purple,serving as both a linguistic and cultural marker for the characters’ expression of their unique experiences,emotions,and identities as African Americans.This study contributes to the broader understanding of the linguistic and cultural dynamics at play in African American literature and holds implications for the analysis of AAVE in other literary works.The findings also open avenues for further research on the intersection of language,identity,and culture in diverse socio-historical contexts.