The dative alternation in African American English: Researching syntactic variation and change across sociolinguistic datasets

Recent research has shown the dative alternation in English to be a productive arena for examining the relationship between group-level variation and the internalization of individuals' grammars. Experimental methods (e. g., Bresnan and Ford 2010) and the analysis of large published corpora (e. g., Bresnan et al. 2007) have revealed subtle cross-dialect differences for this variable. The current paper seeks to improve our understanding of this feature and its bearings on experience-based models of grammar by examining African American English (AAE) data from sociolinguistic interviews and from historical letters written by semi-literate ex-slaves. We also consider some methodological problems of conducting corpus-like analyses on non-standard varieties.