• Abrahams, Roger D. 1962. "Playing the dozens." Jrl of American Folklore 75: 209-218. --- 1976. Talking Black. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers.

• Kochman, Thomas. 1983. "The boundary between play and nonplay in black verbal dueling." Language in Society 12: 329-37.

• Labov, William. 1972. "Rules for Ritual Insults." Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Chap. 8. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

• Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia L. 1970. Language behavior in a Black urban community. Ph.D. dissertation. University of California at Berkeley.

• Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia L. 1972. "Signifying and marking: Two Afro-American speech acts." John J. Gumperz & Dell Hymes, eds., Directions in sociolinguistics. New York: Blackwell, 161-79.

• Morgan, Marcyliena. 1993. "The Africanness of counterlanguage among Afro-Americans." In S. Mufwene, ed., Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties: 423-435. Athens: University of Georgia.

• In their 1998 book African American English (Mufwene, Rickford, Bailey & Baugh, eds), Marcy morgan gives a very useful contextualization and theorization of some related ways of speaking, "More than a mood or an attitude: Discourse and verbal genres in African-American culture". She discusses at least SOUNDIN'/SIGNIFYIN', READIN', and INSTIGATIN', as well as the DOZENS, in terms of directness and intentionality.

  Peter Patrick's

• Website of website on AAVE.

• Smitherman, Geneva. 1993. "If I'm Lyin', I'm Flyin' ". Introduction to The Art of the Snap [sorry, I don't have a reference for this book -- just an excerpt from it -- but would very much like to!].

 Prepared by:
Prof. Peter L. Patrick
Dept. of Language & Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
COLCHESTER CO4 3SQ
U.K.

Tel: (from within UK) 01206.87.2088
    (from outside UK) +44.1206.87.2088
Fax: (as above)           1206.87.2198
Email: patrickp@essex.ac.uk
Web: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp