Nielsen, R. 2013. The Stylistic Use of Prosodic Rhythm in African American English. RASK 37: 301-334.
This article looks into prosodic variation in an individual speaker of African American English (AAE). Building off of prior studies that included the Pairwise Variability Index (PVI), which is a measure of whether a language variety is stress-timed or syllable-timed, the aim of this study was to explore the role that rhythm has in narrative discourse, as well as the social meanings behind “rhythmic style shifts in narratives” (particularly in AAE).
This study analyzes data from a sociolinguistic interview with Michael, the fourteen-year-old DC native featured in Nielsen (2010). Michael is described as a “highly vernacular speaker of the AAE variety spoken in South East Washington, DC” (pg. 310). To be specific, Michael’s use of constructed dialogue with regard to Dubois (2007)’s concept of stance theory was the focus of Nielsen’s study
After calculating PVI values for Michael’s constructed dialogue and his non-dialogue narrative discourse, it was found that the constructed dialogue was more speech-timed, whereas his non-dialogue discourse was more syllable-timed. Nielsen goes on to suggest that Michael made rhythmic style shifting decisions in his constructed dialogue to be more expressive, as well as performing marking, a verbal strategy commonly found in AAE that involves paralinguistic mimicry.