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A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE

  • Chris Collins
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Structure and Variation in Language Contact
This chapter is in the book Structure and Variation in Language Contact

Abstract

In this paper, I describe the use of agentive be (‘If you don’t be careful, you will be caught’) in informal American English. I will show that agentive be has largely the same syntactic behavior as habitual be in AAVE (African American Vernacular English). Based on these similarities, I will conclude the paper by raising a number of questions about the origin of habitual be in AAVE.

Abstract

In this paper, I describe the use of agentive be (‘If you don’t be careful, you will be caught’) in informal American English. I will show that agentive be has largely the same syntactic behavior as habitual be in AAVE (African American Vernacular English). Based on these similarities, I will conclude the paper by raising a number of questions about the origin of habitual be in AAVE.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents vii
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part I: Structure
  5. The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan 9
  6. Tracing the origin of modality in the creoles of Suriname 29
  7. Modelling Creole Genesis 61
  8. The restructuring of tense/aspect systems in creole formation 85
  9. Syntactic properties of negation in Chinook Jargon, with a comparison of two source languages 111
  10. Sri Lankan Malay morphosyntax 135
  11. Sri Lanka Malay 159
  12. The advantages of a blockage-based etymological dictionary for proven or putative relexified languages 183
  13. Part II: Variation
  14. A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE 203
  15. Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English 225
  16. Aspects of variation in educated Nigerian Pidgin 243
  17. A linguistic time-capsule 263
  18. The progressive in the spoken Papiamentu of Aruba 291
  19. Was Haitian ever more like French? 315
  20. The late transfer of serial verb constructions as stylistic variants in Saramaccan creole 337
  21. Index 373
https://doi.org/10.1075/cll.29.12col

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents vii
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part I: Structure
  5. The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan 9
  6. Tracing the origin of modality in the creoles of Suriname 29
  7. Modelling Creole Genesis 61
  8. The restructuring of tense/aspect systems in creole formation 85
  9. Syntactic properties of negation in Chinook Jargon, with a comparison of two source languages 111
  10. Sri Lankan Malay morphosyntax 135
  11. Sri Lanka Malay 159
  12. The advantages of a blockage-based etymological dictionary for proven or putative relexified languages 183
  13. Part II: Variation
  14. A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE 203
  15. Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English 225
  16. Aspects of variation in educated Nigerian Pidgin 243
  17. A linguistic time-capsule 263
  18. The progressive in the spoken Papiamentu of Aruba 291
  19. Was Haitian ever more like French? 315
  20. The late transfer of serial verb constructions as stylistic variants in Saramaccan creole 337
  21. Index 373
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