Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T12:19:04.223Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Back to the past: The BEV/creole connection revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Donald Winford
Donald Winford
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article compares the marking of past temporal reference in Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Trinidadian English (TE), with particular attention to the alternation of Ø and {ed}. The comparison reveals similarities in the patterns of variation according to verb type and phonological conditioning which suggest that past marking in contemporary BEV preserves traces of an earlier process of shift from a creole pattern to one approximating the Standard English pattern. Further examination of the TE data reveals that the use of {ed} is highly constrained in cases where habitual or characteristic past meaning is conveyed; in such cases, the use of Ø is near categorical. These findings may have implications for BEV which future research can clarify. The article also considers the case of stressed remote BIN in BEV and argues that it may have arisen as the result of reanalysis of an earlier creole anterior bin under the influence of unstressed (continuative perfect) bin, derived from English have + been. This provides further support for the view that, though early BEV may not have been a fully fledged creole, it arose through a process of restructuring in which a creole substrate played a significant role. Finally, the article notes that past marking is only one aspect of the overall organization of the BEV tense/mood/aspect system, which shares other features in common with creole varieties, including resultative done and combinatory possibilities among auxiliaries. Future research on these aspects of the BEV verb complex can shed more light on the BEV/creole connection.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , October 1992 , pp. 311 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bailey, Beryl L. (1965). Toward a new perspective in Negro English dialectology. American Speech 40:171–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Charles-James. (1973). Variation and linguistic theory. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bailey, Guy, & Maynor, Natalie. (1985). The present tense of be in southern Black folk speech. American Speech 60:195–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Guy, & Maynor, Natalie. (1987). Decreolization? Language in Society 16:449–473.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Guy, Maynor, Natalie & Cukor-Avila, Patricia (eds.). (1991). The emergence of Black English: Texts and commentary. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baugh, John. (1980). A re-examination of the Black English copula. In Labov, William (ed.), Locating language in time and space. New York: Academic. 83–106.Google Scholar
Baugh, John. (1983). Black street speech: Its history, structure and survival. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bayley, Robert J. (1991). Variation theory and second language learning: Linguistic and social constraints on interlanguage tense marking. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek. (1975). Dynamics of a creole system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek. (1981). Roots of language. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. (1988). The development of English aspectual systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. (1988). The diachronic dimension in explanation. In Hawkins, John A. (ed.), Explaining language universals. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 350–379.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. (1985). Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahl, Osten. (1985). Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
DeBose, Charles, & Faraclas, Nicholas. (1988, 02). An Africanist approach to the linguistic study of Black English: Getting to the roots of the tense/aspect/modality and copula systems in Afro-American. Paper presented at the International Round Table on Africanisms in Afro-American Varieties,University of Georgia,Athens.Google Scholar
Dillard, J. L. (1972). Black English. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Dusková, L. (1976). On some differences in the use of the perfect and preterite between British and American English. Prague Studies in Mathematical Linguistics 5:53–68.Google Scholar
Edwards, Walter. (1975). Sociolinguistic behavior in rural and urban circumstances in Guyana. D.Phil, dissertation, University of York.Google Scholar
Edwards, Walter. (1984). A community-based approach to the provenance of urban Guyanese Creole. York Papers in Linguistics 11:83–94.Google Scholar
Edwards, Walter. (1991). A comparative description of Guyanese creole and Black English preverbal marker don. In Edwards, Walter & Winford, Donald (eds.), Verb phrase patterns in Black English and Caribbean creoles. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 240–255.Google Scholar
Fasold, Ralph. (1972). Tense marking in Black English. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Fenn, Peter. (1987). A semantic and pragmatic examination of the English perfect. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Gibson, Kean. (1982). Tense and aspect in Guyanese creole: A syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis. D.Phil. dissertation, University of York.Google Scholar
Green, Lisa. (1991). Auxiliaries and aspectual markers in Black English. Ms., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory. (1980). Variation in the group and the individual: The case of final stop deletion. In Labov, William (ed.), Locating language in time and space. New York: Academic. 1–36.Google Scholar
Harris, John. (1984). Syntactic variation and dialect divergence. Linguistics 20:303–327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holm, John. (1984). Variability of the copula in Black English and its creole kin. American Speech 59:291–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holm, John. (1988). Pidgins and creoles. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Holm, John. (1991). The Atlantic creoles and the language of the ex-slave recordings. In Maynor, Bailey, & Cukor-Avila, (1991). 231–247.Google Scholar
Holm, John. (1992). A theoretical model for semi-creolization. Paper presented at the 9th biennial conference of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics,University of the West Indies,Barbados.Google Scholar
Jaganauth, Dhanaiswary. (1987). Predicate structures in Guyanese Creole. M.A. thesis, University of the West Indies, Jamaica.Google Scholar
Jaganauth, Dhanaiswary. (1988, 08). Relative time reference in Guyanese Creole: Some problems for sentence-level analyses. Paper presented at the 7th biennial conference of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics,College of the Bahamas.Google Scholar
Kilby, David. (1984). Descriptive syntax and the English verb. Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Krapp, George P. (1924). The English of the Negro. American Mercury 2:190–195.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1972a). Is the Black English Vernacular a separate system? In Labov, William, Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 36–64.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1972b). The isolation of contextual styles. In Labov, William, Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 70–109.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1972c) The study of language in its social context. In Labov, William, Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 183–259.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1982). Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science: The case of the Black English trial in Ann Arbor. Language in Society 11:165–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Cohen, Paul, Robins, Clarence, & Lewis, John. (1968). A study of the non-standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City. Report on Cooperative Research Project 3288, Vol. 1. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. (1966). Stative adjectives and verbs in English. Harvard Computational Laboratory Report NSF-17. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.Google Scholar
Loman, Bengt. (1967). Conversations in a Negro American dialect. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
McDavid, Raven Jr (1950). Review of Lorenzo Dow Turner (1949) Africanisms in the Gullah dialect. Language 26:323–333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko. (1983). Some observations on the verb in Black English Vernacular. African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center Paper Series 2, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko. (1984). Stativity and the progressive. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko. (1987). Review article on language variety in the South: Perspectives in black and white, Montgomery, and Bailey, (eds., 1986), Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 2:93–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko. (1991). Is Gullah decreolizing? A comparison of a speech sample of the 1930's with a speech sample of the 1980's. In Maynor, Bailey, & Cukor-Avila, (1991). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 213–230.Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko. (1992a). Ideology and facts on African American English. Pragmatics 2(2):141–166.Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko. (in press). African-American English. Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 6. History of American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Niles, Norma A. (1980). Provincial English dialects and Barbadian English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Patrick, Peter. (1991). Creoles at the intersection of variable processes: -t,d deletion and past marking in the Jamaican mesolect. Language Variation and Change 3(2):171–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patrick, Peter. (1992). Past marking and decreolization in urban Jamaican creole. Ms., Georgetown University, Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Pollard, Velma. (1989). The particle en in Jamaican creole: A discourse related account. English World Wide 10(1):55–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, & Sankoff, David. (1984). El inglés de Samaná y la hipótesis del origen criollo. Boletin de la Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española 8:103–121.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Sankoff, David. (1987). The Philadelphia story in the Spanish Caribbean. American Speech 62:291–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, Carmen. (1991). Habitual structures among Blacks and Whites in the 1990's. American Speech 66(3):292–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rickford, John. (1973). Been in Black English. Ms., University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Rickford, John. (1974). The insights of the mesolect. In DeCamp, David & Hancock, Ian (eds.), Pidgins and creoles: Current trends and prospects. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 92–117.Google Scholar
Rickford, John. (1975). Carrying the new wave into syntax: The case of Black English BIN. In Fasold, Ralph & Shuy, Roger (eds.), Analyzing variation in language. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 162–183.Google Scholar
Rickford, John. (1977). The question of prior creolization in Black English. In Valdman, Albert (ed.), Pidgin and creole linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 190–221.Google Scholar
Rickford, John. (1979). Variation in a creole continuuum: Quantitative and implicational approaches. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Rickford, John. (1986). Past marking in the Guyanese mesolect: A close look at Bonnette. In Denning, Keith, Inkelas, Sharon, McNair-Knox, Faye, & Rickford, John (eds.), Variation in language: NWAV-XV at Stanford. Stanford: Stanford University, Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Rickford, John. (1992). Grammatical variation and divergence in vernacular Black English. In Gerritsen, Marinel & Stein, Dieter (eds.), Internal and External Factors in Syntactic Change. The Hague: Mouton. 175–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. (1982). On the history of Black English in the USA: Some new evidence. English World Wide 3:18–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. (1983). The diachronic development of the Black English perfective auxiliary phrase. Journal of English Linguistics 16:55–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. (1989). American earlier Black English. University: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. (1990). The cline of creoleness in English-oriented Creoles and semi-creoles of the Caribbean. English World Wide 11:79–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shilling, Alison. (1977). Some nonstandard features of Bahamian dialect syntax. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii.Google Scholar
Shilling, Alison. (1980). Bahamian English: A non-continuum? In Day, Richard (ed.), Issues in English creoles. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag. 133–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singler, John. (1984). Variation in tense-aspect-modality in Liberian English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Singler, John. (1991). Copula variation in Liberian Settler English and American Black English. In Edwards, Walter & Winford, Donald (eds.), Verb phrase patterns in Black English and creoles. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 129–164.Google Scholar
Stewart, William. (1967). Sociolinguistic factors in the history of American Negro dialects. The Florida FL Reporter 5(2):1–4.Google Scholar
Stewart, William. (1968). Continuity and change in American Negro dialects. The Florida FL Reporter 6(1):3–4, 14–16, 18.Google Scholar
Stewart, William. (1974). Acculturative processes and the language of the American Negro. In Page, William W. (ed.), Language in its social setting. Washington, DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington. 1–46.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali, & Poplack, Shana. (1988). How Black English past got to the present: Evidence from Samaná. Language in Society 17:513–533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomason, Sarah, & Kaufman, Terrence. (1988). Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winford, Donald. (1972). A sociolinguistic description of two communities in Trinidad. D.Phil, dissertation, University of York.Google Scholar
Winford, Donald. (1980). The creole continuum in the context of sociolinguistic studies. In Day, Richard (ed.), Issues in English creoles: Proceedings of the 1975 Hawaii Conference. Heidelberg: Julius Groos. 51–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winford, Donald. (1992a). Another look at the copula in Black English and Caribbean creoles. American Speech 67(1):21–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winford, Donald. (1992b, 10). Variability in the use of Perfect have in Trinidadian English. Paper presented at NWAV XXI,University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Winford, Donald. (1993). Predication in Caribbean English creoles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. (1969). A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro English. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt, & Hatfield, Deborah. (1984). Tense marking in second language learning: Patterns of spoken and written English in a Vietnamese community. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar