GRAMMATICAL PATTERN OF AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH (AAVE) IN RICHARD WRIGHT SHORT STORY, THE MAN WHO ALMOST A MAN

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a kind of another variation of American English. It has uniqueness features which lies on the grammatical pattern, lexical pattern, and phonological variation. The aims of this study are to reveal the grammatical pattern of AAVE found in the Richard Wright short story, The Man Who Almost A Man and explain the reasons of African American characters using AAVE in this short story. The writer uses the theory of AAVE by Green (2002) then supporting theory by Meyerhoff (2006), Yule (2006), Hall (2009) and Edward (2009) for answer the second problem. The data for this study taken from the utterances of all African American characters in short story. Then, The writer using qualitative method because the data came in the form of text. She tries to observes, describes and interprets. The result finds that this study supported the finding of the newest previous study by Ningrum (2014). The reasons of African American characters using AAVE because to show the identity of African American ethnic group and to show the solidarity among others. Based on the writer’s findings, there was a possibility that African American characters tend to simplify their utterance from Standard American English (SAE)