Internal grammatical conditioning in African-American vernacular English

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been defined as a social dialect or a non-standard variety of American English, which contains specific phonological and grammatical features. Some of these features are unique to AAVE, while others may be shared with other informal varieties of American English. Speakers of AAVE usually alternate between the use of AAVE features and their Standard English (SE) equivalents, which may be influenced by external identity constraints and internal grammatical restrictions. This article examines grammatical variability of the selected AAVE features in interviews with ten African-American public figures. The selected features include the third person singular s absence, the possessive s absence, the plural s absence, and the generalization of is and was to plural and second person pronouns. I highlight favorable grammatical environments in which the features occur at the highest rate and search for particular patterns in the variability of AAVE features according to subject type and verb type. My results are then compared with the outcomes of previous linguistic findings on internal conditioning in AAVE. The main objective of this study is to statistically present the frequencies of AAVE features in the interviews with the chosen celebrities in order to explore the influence of internal grammatical mechanisms. Linguistic patterns and restrictions in the use of AAVE demonstrate that AAVE is a systematic means of communication and an ordered language variety