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lewis lister - chapter 6: conclusion lyrics

6. conclusion
this study then, concludes that the artists jay-z and nas use aave speech to construct their ident-ty. of the eight variables, the phonological aave variants were produced with a considerably higher frequency than any of the other, morphological, variants. it is this finding that warrants the conclusion that phonological variants are preferable to morphological variants in the construction of ident-ty through aave. incidentally, nas produced a far greater total frequency of aave variants than jay-z. therefore, nas marks his speech as aave through morpho-syntactic features to a greater extent than jay-z. however, a comparison of the non morpho-syntactic features (see section
5.3, above) used may yield a different result
returning to the research questions outlined in section 1 (above), this study concludes that the speakers undoubtedly used aave variants to a significant extent. of the eight features that were coded for, all but one exhibited variation. the features used most prominently, and which this study takes to be linguistic markers of ident-ty in the speech of jay-z and nas, are the devoicing of voiced stops in stressed syllables, the reduction of final consonant cl-sters when followed by words beginning with a vowel, and the use of habitual ‘be’. as discussed in section 5.1 (above), each variable is subject to its own set of internal and external constraints: their variation is not free

areas worthy of further research
this study used two speakers as the basis for its data, which provided a valuable insight into how these two speakers used aave in the construction of their ident-ty, what is true for them may not be true for other hip hop artists. further studies of the speech of other artists would enable us to make statements about aave usage by hip hop artists in general, and the extent to which they pattern similarly to jay-z and nas. this would not only tell us which aave variants are favoured by the hip hop community, but also how typical jay-z and nas are of that community

furthermore, this study is strictly synchronic: only the first album of each artist was used. this allowed for excellent typological insight. similar studies of each artists’ subsequent albums would provide further insight as to whether or not their use of aave remained the same. trudgill’s work on the beatles (cite dat) evaluated the band’s language use over time with respect to their varying target audience. perhaps this factor may also have an interesting effect on the language use of jay-z and nas
in order to control the effect of geographical location as a variable, this study focussed on the speech of artists from the same area: both jay-z and nas are from the new york city area. while this effectively delimited the effect of geographical location on their variable language use, it enabled no comment to be made about the geographical variation that the features of aave exhibit. for example, there is a great deal of stylistic variation (and indeed rivalry) between hip hop artists of the east coast and those of the west coast. it would be interesting to see whether or not there would be any difference between the aave features that artists from either coast use to mark their ident-ty

also, this study has been concerned with the genre of hip hop music. this was beneficial because of the fact that ident-ty is so vital to the genre (smitherman 2000), and indeed the subculture as a whole. however, artists of other musical genres no doubt consider their ident-ty to be equally paramount in their lyrics. for example, language is used in some uk punk rock music in order to retain a sense of unique, non-american ident-ty” (frith 1998). with punk music exploring similar themes to hip hop; violence, underprivilege, alienation and rejection (frith 1998), there is a clear parallel between linguistic identification in punk and in hip hop. taking this into account, there is certainly still a lot of scope for linguistic enquiry in the lyrics of various musical genres
rappers also use lexical items as ident-ty markers (cite dat). through their use of location-specific slang, rappers construct a constantly changing ident-ty: “street speech is the nonstandard dialect that thrives within the black street culture, and it is constantly fluctuating, as new terminology flows in and out of colloquial vogue” (baugh 1983: 5-6). it is likely that an in-depth -n-lysis of lexical items used as markers would also provide insight into the linguistic construction of ident-ty in aave

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