Syntactic characteristics of African American Vernacular English on A Raisin’ in The Sun film

ABSTRACT

This research investigates the syntactic characteristics of African American Vernacular English used in a Raisin’ in the Sun film. African American Vernacular English syntactic characteristic is a syntactic item of African American Vernacular English which has identifiable characteristic. The purposes of the research are to find out the African American Vernacular English syntactic characteristics and understand how those syntactic characteristics are used.

The descriptive qualitative method is used to conduct this research. This research describes and explains the syntactic characteristics of African American Vernacular English used by Younger in the film. To obtain the systematic data, the researcher himself became the main instrument by watching the film, browsing the script from internet, reading and classifying the data. Then the data are presented and analyzed by using the syntactic characteristics of African American Vernacular English theory proposed by Trudgill and Wardhaugh.

In this research, the researcher found that there are 5 syntactic characteristic of African American Vernacular English produced by Younger in this film. They are the use of negation (negativized auxiliary pre-position, the used of ain’t, and the use of multiple negation), the absence of –s in third person singular present tense forms, absence of auxiliary (the zero copula), aspectual system (done and been), question transformation (yes/no question, Wh-question). The result shows that Younger used these syntactical characteristics frequently. The more is the use of ain’t but it doesn’t use for present (do+not) and past (did+not) and the rare is the use of aspectual system done and been while existential it, question transformation (question inversion), and habitual be are not found.

After analysing data, the researcher concluded that African American simplify the Standard English form into their own form that is AAVE. The simplification then becomes one of the characteristics of AAVE itself which differs from Standard English. So, AAVE syntactic characteristic is not wrong Standard English but the result of syntactic simplification from Standard English.