ABSTRACT
Speakers of other English dialects sometimes view the sentence structure of African-American vernacular English (AAVE) as distinct from the many varieties of English spoken in the United States and elsewhere. African Americans who speak AAVE may feel the same way, and some may even make this distinctiveness a point of ethnic pride. In the sense that each dialect of English is unique, those who believe that AAVE is sui generis are right. But the distinctiveness of AAVE does not particularly reside in the structure of its sentences. Basic utterance types - e.g., declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences - are all formed in essentially the same way as they are in other dialects. Even where its sentence structure is notably different from most other dialects, AAVE is generally not unique: those syntactic structures purportedly found only in AAVE are in fact part of dialects spoken by other groups, especially but not limited to Anglo-American vernacular English speakers who live in the southern United States. Therefore, except where warranted, we will examine AAVE sentence structures without making any claims for their uniqueness.
