African-American Vernacular English within American 'Gangsta Rap'

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics grade: 27 University of Münster (Anglistik/Amerikanistik) course: Proseminar American English language: English abstract: This abstract shall give another piece of the puzzle to what is considered to be African-American Vernacular English. With scientific aid of well-known concepts by linguists such as Green in particular but also Wolfram Schilling-Estes Mufwene and Poplack we want to focus on specific grammatical features of AAVE and to what extend these can be recovered in the Hip-Hop subgenre of American West Coast Gangsta Rap. A small but significant text corpus of four representative songs (added to the appendix in the shape of lyrics) cover the source for a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The given text shall give a short overview about the origin and different theories on AAVE first and will further on primarily adapt the characteristic linguistic features L. Green and Wolfram & Schilling-Estes worked out and apply them to our little song text corpus.