The phonetic reduction of didn't

The first hypothesis involves the phonetic reduction of didn't in discourse. Fasold and Wolfram (Reference Fasold and Wolfram1970) proposed deletion of the initial /d/ and assimilation of the medial /d/ with the following nasal such that didn't became [ɪnt] and then converged with uses of ain't already present in AAE. Rickford (Reference Rickford and Day1980) suggested that initial d-deletion in AAE operates according to a sonority scale, whereby less sonorant segments preceding didn't promoted consonant cluster deletion, a theory which aligns with the high rate of final consonant cluster deletion in AAE (Wolfram & Fasold, Reference Wolfram and Fasold1974) and initial d-deletion in English Creole languages and AAE (Rickford, Reference Rickford and Day1980). However, persistent synchronic reflexes of this potential origin have not been found. Specifically, Weldon (Reference Weldon1994) found no significant relationship between preceding consonants, hypothesized to promote use of ain't as a remnant of d-deletion, and use of ain't over didn't. Notably, Weldon's data also show that there are roughly ten times as many vowels (n = 56) as consonants (n = 6) preceding ain't in this context, which is an unexpected finding if more sonorous segments like vowels should promote retention of initial /d/.

Another potential source of d-deletion comes from Bybee and Scheibman (Reference Bybee and Scheibman1999), who demonstrated that auxiliary don't is reduced most in the contexts where it occurs most frequently, namely, following the first person singular subject pronoun I and preceding the verbs know and think. They argue that the collocations I don't know and I don't think form constituents that are stored and processed as units with specialized discourse pragmatic functions, and as such their internal constituents are more likely to undergo phonetic reduction. The frequent reduction of /d/ in didn't and don't to nasalized vowels in AAE may then be attributable to similar processes since subject pronouns overwhelmingly precede instances of ain't in several tense-aspect contexts in AAE (Walker, Reference Walker2005; Weldon, Reference Weldon1994), and some work shows first person singular pronouns occurring most frequently preceding ain't (Loman, Reference Loman1967; Maynor, Reference Maynor, Sabino and Bernstein1997).

Present perfect constructions and the shift to past/perfective meaning

Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca wrote, “For a [construction] to have two or more uses implies a diachronic relation between [them]” (Reference Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca1994:52–3). The construction ain't + V(-ed) can be used synchronically in contexts of both anterior (ain't~haven't/hasn't) and past/perfective (ain't~didn't) meaning in AAE. Thus, another theory on the origin of ain't for didn't proposes that it developed from anterior uses in negated present perfect constructions (Smith, Reference Smith, Donaher and Katz2015).

The English present perfect (have/has(n't) + past participle) canonically conveys anterior meaning, which establishes a relationship between a past state or event and the moment of speech. This contrasts with the past tense construction (preterit verbal form or did[n't]), indicating that a situation is viewed as temporally bound (perfective) and occurred before the moment of speech (past). A major distinction between present perfect and past tense constructions in English involves their use with past time adverbs like yesterday. Because the present perfect's reference time can overlap with the moment of speech, such adverbs are frequently restricted from use with it while they are used freely with the past tense (Klein, Reference Klein1992; Portner, Reference Portner2003). Comrie (Reference Comrie1976) broke the English present perfect down into four subtypes, each exemplified in (3a-d) below (modified from examples from Comrie [Reference Comrie1976]).

1. (3)

   1. a. Jan has arrived. [Perfect of Result]

   2. b. Sam has been to America. [Experiential Perfect]

   3. c. We've lived here for ten years. [Perfect of Persistent Situation]

   4. d. The Eagles have just won the Super Bowl! [Perfect of Recent Past]

Though some sentences convey continuation of a past situation into or overlapping with the present (e.g., [3c]), others describe situations that may have occurred entirely in the past (e.g., [3a, b, d]). Such present perfect sentences are argued to convey either the “resultant state” of a past action (Perfect of Result) or “current relevance” to the discourse situation (Experiential Perfect or Perfect of Recent Past). The use of ain't in present perfect constructions dates back to the 1600s in varieties of English (Anderwald, Reference Anderwald2002; Jespersen, Reference Jespersen1961), and ain't is used in this context in AAE. For example, in (4) below, Tommy not seeing his father is understood to overlap with the moment of speech, aided by the temporal phrase in such a long time.

1. (4) And it's already done since I ain't seen him in such a long time. [Tommy, m, age 18/1965]

It is noteworthy that negation may have an atelicizing effect on the situation described by the present perfect (Elsness, Reference Elsness1997; Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos, Reference Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos2008), which may favor continuative interpretations. In contrast, the affirmative counterpart to this sentence (I've seen him [since then]) could be understood as describing at least one single past event.

Smith (Reference Smith, Donaher and Katz2015) proposed that it is the use of ain't to convey anterior meaning in present perfect constructions that gave rise to its use in past/perfective contexts in AAE. Smith argued that this expansion was driven by frequency effects since he found ain't in past/perfective contexts only with high frequency verbs in a corpus of contemporary fiction. Smith's (Reference Smith, Donaher and Katz2015) theory aligns with crosslinguistic diachronic data from several Romance and Germanic languages demonstrating semantic shift by auxiliary + participle constructions expressing anterior meaning to past or perfective meaning, commonly referred to as the Aoristic Drift (Bybee & Dahl, Reference Bybee and Dahl1989; Bybee et al., Reference Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca1994; Comrie, Reference Comrie1976; Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos, Reference Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos2008 for Mexican and Peninsular Spanish; Squartini & Bertinetto, Reference Squartini and Bertinetto2000 for Romance). In these languages, the periphrastic construction increased in use over time and eventually supplanted synthetic past tense constructions to express past/perfective meaning.

The shift from anterior-to-past/perfective is part of a larger shift in which a construction that originally expresses resultative meaning, used to describe a state that exists as the result of a past action, evolves into one expressing anterior meaning before turning into a past/perfective marker. Because have + participle constructions are frequent sources for resultatives that later develop into anteriors, this theory does not require the use of ain't in contexts of past/perfective meaning to have derived directly from didn't. The semantic change thought to be involved in this shift is the gradual generalization of the construction to reference a situation that occurred at a nonspecific point in time prior to the moment of speech.

This paper adds to Smith's (Reference Smith, Donaher and Katz2015) proposal in the following ways. First, I underscore the role that temporal ambiguity might play in this development, following Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos (Reference Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos2008). Ain't is inherently ambiguous as it provides no overt morphological cues to tense-aspect and is used across tense-aspect categories. It becomes further temporally ambiguous when it occurs in absence of temporal expressions that might situate the reference time of the utterance as either past or present. Therefore, I will also briefly examine the use or nonuse of temporal expressions that co-occur with ain't. Second, I hypothesize that the expansion of ain't to a past/perfective variant of didn't may have been aided by the lexical semantics of verbs in ain't + V(-ed) constructions. Portner (Reference Portner2003) demonstrated that while most dynamic verbs in present perfect constructions are interpreted as having occurred wholly in the past, stative verbs may allow both a continuative or past/perfective interpretation (see also Comrie, Reference Comrie1976:49–50). Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos (Reference Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos2008) likewise found that the present perfect disfavors achievement predicates in Mexican Spanish, where the construction is at a less advanced stage of grammaticalization as a past/perfective compared to Peninsular Spanish, where no Aktionsart restrictions were found. I will therefore look for indications that dynamic verbs may have played a role in the expansion of ain't by examining their distribution in both anterior and past/perfective contexts.

This hypothesis partially aligns with work by DeBose (Reference DeBose1994), who proposed that ain't in AAE is a temporally neutral negator, and the tense-aspect meaning of sentences containing ain't is conveyed through verbal stativity, similar to what happens in many West African and English Creole languages related to AAE. According to DeBose, dynamic verbs give rise to past/perfective interpretations, and stative verbs to anterior interpretations. Though the distribution of verbs following ain't by stativity has already been shown to vary (Weldon, Reference Weldon1994), this will nonetheless be reinvestigated here for indications of the role of dynamic verbs in the shift from anterior to past/perfective for ain't.

The present perfect and past tense in AAE

A question that must be asked is why a change from anterior to past/perfective meaning would happen for ain't + V(-ed) constructions in AAE, but not in other varieties of English, particularly those varieties of English that also use ain't?

Although the English present perfect began shifting from resultative to anterior meaning during Old and Middle English, in Modern English it appears that, unlike several Romance and Germanic languages where the present perfect has generalized, use of the past tense is instead increasing at the expense of the present perfect, especially in American English (Elsness, Reference Elsness1997). The predominance of past tense constructions in varieties of American English like AAE is highlighted by the fact that they frequently occur with temporal adverbs formerly associated with anterior meaning such as already and yet. In fact, AAE is reported to allow the use of past tense constructions (preterit verbs) to convey anterior meaning (Dayton, Reference Dayton1996; Déchaine, Reference Déchaine1993; Green, Reference Green2002; Labov et al,. Reference Labov, Cohen, Robins and Lewis1968; Terry, Reference Terry2010), and the status of the present perfect construction as a fully integrated part of the grammar has frequently been questioned (Dillard, Reference Dillard1972; Labov et al., Reference Labov, Cohen, Robins and Lewis1968:223; Loflin, Reference Loflin1967; Rickford & Théberge-Rafal, Reference Rickford and Théberge-Rafal1996; Tagliamonte, Reference Tagliamonte1997). Still, there is evidence of a shift in English uses of the present perfect constructions with past time denoting adverbs like yesterday, for example, in the British National Corpus (Schaden, Reference Schaden2009:124). Likewise, Australian English allows the present perfect to co-occur with past time adverbials and be used in narrative sequences (Engle & Ritz, Reference Engle and Ritz2000).

As for AAE, there are also clues to further movement along the anterior-to-past/perfective trajectory. First, there has already been a shift from past anterior to past/perfective meaning for the had + V(-ed) construction, also during the twentieth century. Cukor-Avila and Bailey (Reference Cukor-Avila, Bailey, Ahlers, Bilmes, Guenter, Kaiser and Namkung1995) showed that had + V(-ed) was first used in the orientation clauses of narratives to perform a backgrounding function, as an extension of its use in the pluperfect, and gradually moved into complicating action clauses as it grammaticalized to refer to past, completed events among AAE speakers in Texas. Rickford and Théberge-Rafal (Reference Rickford and Théberge-Rafal1996) found that had + V(-ed) with past/perfective meaning occurs predominantly with dynamic verbs in the first complicating action clauses of narratives among preadolescents in East Palo Alto, CA.

Second, there are some examples of affirmative present perfect constructions being used in past/perfective contexts in Philadelphia AAE. For example, in (5) below, Malika uses the present perfect to describe her mother not giving her affection although her mother has been deceased for several years, demonstrating that, for her, subjects in present perfect constructions are not required to be currently living (Schaden, Reference Schaden2009).

1. (5) … That was the only time in my life that I remember mom givin me some affection, to be honest. I'm not sayin that she hasn't given me affection, but for some reason or another I don't seem to remember it.

   [Malika, f, age 30/1951]

The question remains, however, why multiple constructions in the grammar of AAE would be further along in this shift. Some have suggested that the use of ain't in past/perfective contexts, in particular, points to the African or Creole origins of AAE (DeBose, Reference DeBose1994; DeBose & Faraclas, Reference DeBose, Faraclas and Mufwene1993; Rickford, Reference Rickford and Day1980). On the other hand, work by Weldon (Reference Weldon1994) and Walker (Reference Walker2005) arrives at the conclusion that AAE ain't is most likely derived from English negated auxiliary contractions given similar distributions and constraints on use.

The remainder of this paper investigates the use of ain't in a variety of AAE spoken in Philadelphia with particular attention paid to the use of ain't for didn't in the hope that comparing this use of ain't to its uses in other contexts will shed light on its origins and development in past/perfective contexts.

The UMLC corpus

The data comes from recorded casual conversations collected for the Influence of Urban Minorities on Linguistic Change Project [UMLC] (Labov, Reference Labov1984). The current study uses data from forty-two corpus speakers who represent a diversity of African American experiences within Philadelphia.Footnote ²

Speakers were recorded in conversation with a member of Philadelphia's Black community in his early 30s, Wendell A. Harris, nicknamed “Popcorn.” Many recordings were made within Harris's social network, including close family members and friends. Most of the speakers lived, worked, and interacted on a daily basis, primarily with other Black speakers (Baugh, Reference Baugh1983). Previous work pinpoints a “core” network of speakers within the corpus who had the most advanced use of narrative -s (Labov & Harris, Reference Labov, Harris and Sankoff1986) as well as a neutral short-a system, a characteristic of speakers deeply embedded in Philadelphia's Black community (Labov, Reference Labov2014). Seven “core” speakers are included in this study. However, the sample also includes speakers with more frequent contact outside of Harris's network and the Black community more generally.

The forty-two speakers analyzed here grew up either in Philadelphia or various southern states (Alabama, Georgia, North/South Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia). Those born in the South moved to Philadelphia as adolescents or adults, reflecting the migratory patterns of the Great Migration. The age and gender distribution of the forty-two speakers is shown in Table 1. Speakers ranged in year of birth from 1901 to 1969, but cohort years are rounded.

Table 1. Age and gender for 42 speakers in the UMLC Corpus (Labov, Reference Labov1984)

Most adolescent speakers were still in high school at the time (10% of all speakers). Otherwise, speakers’ educational experience ranged from having completed some high school (28%) to completing some higher education (14%), ranging from half a year at community college to four-year degrees or further professional training. Most speakers, however, had only completed high school (48%).

Extraction and semantic coding

The average duration of each recording for the forty-two speakers was forty-five minutes. Recordings were orthographically transcribed in Elan by the author or a research assistant. The author controlled transcription quality during auditory coding of the variables.

All tokens of not and n't-negation in the six grammatical contexts where ain't is a possible variant (shown below in Table 2) were extracted from recordings. Since the main interest was in factors conditioning the use of ain't as opposed to any other variant, all variants were treated as possible choices to fulfill the function of negation in AAE (Labov, Reference Labov1993; Wolfram, Reference Wolfram1991), including utterances in which the copula or auxiliary be was absent.Footnote ³ Table 2 describes the variants, observations, and observed following verbal morphology for all six variable contexts. Several sentence types were excluded from the token counts in Table 2, including sentences where an uncontracted form of the auxiliary was used since they typically express emphasis or contrast in AAE (Fisher, Reference Fisher2018; Green, Reference Green2002). Additionally, in past tense constructions, phonetic forms “intermediate” between ain't and another auxiliary (e.g., [ınt] without an initial [d] or diphthongal vowel) were also excluded since they could be truncated forms of either didn't or ain't. In total, there were fifty-one exclusions of such intermediate forms in sentences that conveyed past/perfective meaning.

Table 2. Grammatical variables in which ain't is a variant

In most cases, the verbal complement following ain't disambiguated one context from another except for past tense and present perfect constructions, which both allow -ed verbs and other preterit forms following ain't. In these cases, the semantics of the utterance were determined by its discourse context, such as whether it described a past/perfective situation that was no longer occurring (past tense) or a situation that continues up to or overlaps with the present (anterior/present perfect).Footnote ⁴ Continuation and/or overlap with the moment of speech was prioritized for categorizing utterances as anterior as opposed to present relevance, which is much more difficult to interpret. In general, this was aided by the fact that negative present perfect constructions lend themselves to atelic or continuative readings. Temporal expressions that reflected continuation into the present were often integral in determining anterior meaning, as noted by Portner (Reference Portner2003:489). In general, temporal expressions that indicated time reference, including already, yet, and never, were more frequently used in anterior utterances compared to past/perfective ones.

The narrative in (6) offers insight into how this semantic coding was determined. This narrative contains three instances of the construction ain't with bark, the first two of which were coded as present perfect (anterior meaning) and the third as past tense (past/perfective). Note that the main verb bark may appear in base form due to final consonant cluster deletion.

1. (6) Gw: Peanut ain't bark since I had him, Pop. That motherfucker will not bark for shit.

   WH: He used to bark all the time in the yard.

   Gw: {Laughs} I ain't never heard Peanut bark. Ron be teasin’ him, tryin’ to get him to bark. That dog will not bark for nothin’ […] he jumped all the way over the couch, over my head the other night. Ron had his mouth, tryin’ to, you know, see if he'd growl or bark […] he got away from Ron […] He jumped all the way over me, over the couch […] and he still ain't bark.

   [Gwen, f, age 24/1957]

In (6), the use of the adverb since in Gwen's first utterance clearly demonstrates continuance of the “not barking” situation from the time that she got her dog, “Peanut,” up to the present. She continues, I ain't never heard Peanut bark, which, in context, expresses the same continuation into the present, aided by the adverb never, to emphasize that the situation persists. However, in the third utterance, Gwen reinforces the fact that Peanut has never once barked by telling a story about a specific time in the past when he did not bark at Ron.

Sentences were only coded as semantically ambiguous between anterior and past/perfective meaning in total absence of discourse cues to time reference, such as the utterance I ain't do nothing in (7).

1. (7) D: Yeah they had—they caught me and everything. So they um—

   WH: Were they roughing you up too?

   D: Yeah, they were. The – especially whatever his name was, Officer Johnson. So

   he was getting all smart with me. I was like, “What you holding me for? I ain't

   got nothing. I ain't do nothing.”

   [Donette, f, age 16/1965]

In (10), it is unclear whether Donette means, “I didn't do anything” for which to be held by police in the first place, or “I haven't done anything” up to the point in time of the altercation. Perhaps the difference is of little consequence in this scenario. Nonetheless, sentences coded as ambiguous (n = 32) were excluded from the main analysis but will be discussed in Section 6 as they may shed light on the pathway of change from anterior to past/perfective meaning for ain't.

Social and stylistic factors

Gender does not emerge as a significant predictor of use, nor does the interaction between YOB and gender, though men do slightly favor use of ain't in keeping with previous findings (Antieau, Reference Antieau, Donaher and Katz2015; Feagin, Reference Feagin1979). Results for speaker region of origin show a difference in past tense use of ain't by the seven speakers from the South included in the model. These speakers use ain't less frequently compared to those from Philadelphia, regardless of age (Figure 2), which is consistent with ain't in the past tense proliferating among northern, urban residents during the period of the Great Migration. However, since some southern speakers (gray squares in Figure 2) do use ain't in this context, albeit at very low rates, this disparity could point to regional differences rather than origins.

Results for negative concord and education are consistent with the status of ain't as a vernacular variant. They confirm previous findings that ain't collocates with negative concord (Fasold & Wolfram, Reference Fasold and Wolfram1970; Foreman, Reference Foreman, Donaher and Katz2015; Weldon, Reference Weldon1994), indicating that speakers use ain't in stylistic contexts where negative concord is also used.Footnote ⁶ Additionally, speakers in the lower three groups for education (i.e., those that did not attend higher education) significantly favor use of ain't in the past tense. Having any experience in higher education disfavors it, mirroring findings by Hazen et al. (Reference Hazen, Kinnaman, Holz, Vandevender, Walden, Donaher and Katz2015) and Antieau (Reference Antieau, Donaher and Katz2015) and indicating that there is increased social pressure on college-educated speakers to avoid using ain't when they come from speech communities where ain't is a staple of the grammar.

Linguistic factors

In keeping with Weldon's (Reference Weldon1994) results, this study finds that preceding vowels significantly favor use of ain't in the past tense. This is contrary to what would be expected if ain't for didn't is derived from d-deletion and the reduction of didn't following a consonant. A closer look reveals that this effect is driven by the fact that ain't most often occurs following pronominal subjects, which overwhelmingly end in vowels. Table 4 shows that, of the 198 tokens of ain't found in past tense contexts, 93% are preceded by subject pronouns.

Table 4. Cross-tabulation of sentence subjects by phonological segment preceding ain't in the past tense (Chi-squared test, p < 0.001)

Though preceding vowel favors use of ain't compared to use of didn't, subject pronouns ending in vowels are also more likely to occur preceding didn't (86% of 690 tokens, chi-squared test, p < 0.001). At first glance, this pattern indicates that if d-deletion reduced didn't to (a)in't, any reflexes of that origin are no longer present in synchronic data. Assuming that subject pronouns are used at roughly the same rates today as they were in the past, the phonological environment believed to promote d-deletion may not be robust enough in natural speech to have sparked such a change on its own.

In Bybee and Scheibman (Reference Bybee and Scheibman1999), auxiliary don't was most frequently reduced following the first person singular subject pronoun, I, the context where it occurs most frequently. In the Philadelphia data, the most frequently used subject pronoun with both ain't and didn't is indeed the first person singular, as in I ain't/didn't, used roughly half the time in both contexts (52% of all ain't and 46% of all didn't utterances). Bringing the intermediate forms (e.g., ɪnt) into this discussion confirms these findings: it also occurs most frequently when preceded by the subject pronoun I. Thus for this data as well, I ain't/didn't/ɪnt could potentially function as a single unit of meaning, perhaps with a particular pragmatic function when followed by certain verbs. A more fine-grained examination is clearly necessary, but still, the reduction of didn't due to the frequency of collocation with other elements of the sentence could be one possible mechanism by which didn't became ain't in AAE.

A second linguistic factor examined was the status of following verb phrases as either stative or dynamic. First, within the corpus there are frequently stative verbs following ain't that describe past/perfective states as in (8). In this example, Tommy describes an earlier point in time, delimited by the when clause, when he was unaware of the relationship between his friend, Will, and girlfriend, Rita.

1. (8) WH: How you meet Rita?

   T: [..] Ah, she used to talk to my boy Will […]

   WH: Is he mad at you now?

   T: Oh no, ‘cause see, one day, one day I saw Rita down the way, down his way,

   and um—that's when I ain't know they was talkin—and I gave Rita my phone

   number…

   [Tommy, m, age 18/1965]

Sentences like that in (8) demonstrate that stative verbs are possible following ain't in past tense contexts. However, the model reveals that dynamic verbs significantly favor use of ain't over didn't. This finding lends some support to the hypothesis that dynamic verbs in ain't + V(-ed) constructions that may have originally expressed anterior meaning pushed speakers toward a past/perfective interpretation. This finding also partially aligns with DeBose's (Reference DeBose1994) claim that dynamic verbs promote a past/perfective interpretation, though, like Weldon (Reference Weldon1994), the Philadelphia data also demonstrate that both stative and dynamic verbs may follow ain't in this tense-aspect context.

Ain't in established contexts

A total of 906 tokens of ain't or negated be/have/do in copular, present progressive, periphrastic future, present tense (got), and present perfect constructions were extracted for all forty-two speakers in the sample (see Table 2 for token counts by environment). These represent the five grammatical contexts in which ain't has been used in varieties of English for centuries. Results are shown in Figure 3. Rates were calculated for twenty-seven of the forty-two speakers with more than ten tokens of ain't across the five contexts combined. Token counts for each individual are illustrated by the size of the point in the plot. Average ain't use for all twenty-seven speakers is 65.8%, nearly three times the rate of ain't in past tense contexts.

In Figure 3, the linear regression of speaker rates is not significant, indicating no change over time for ain't in the five established grammatical contexts. Though there is little data for speakers born before 1940, these speakers show much higher rates of ain't in these contexts (e.g., 33-96%) compared to the past context (0-25%). The seven triangles in the upper right corner are the same “core” speakers highlighted in Figure 1. Once again, these are speakers producing ain't at some of the highest levels in this data.

Each of the five grammatical contexts combined above was also examined individually with speaker data pooled into three birthyear cohorts (see Table 1). The results, shown in Figure 4 below, further support that there is no change in ain't usage in apparent time in the majority of contexts.

Figure 4. Use of ain't across five grammatical contexts in apparent time for all forty-two speakers (n = 906) divided into three age cohorts. Token counts in each grammatical context by cohort can be found at the base of each bar.

Each birthyear cohort's frequency of use was compared to the other cohorts using chi-squared tests to evaluate the likelihood of differences between cohort frequencies. Overall rates of ain't in each grammatical context align with studies conducted in other northern cities around this time. For example, Weldon (Reference Weldon1994), with data from fifty-six speakers collected only a decade later in Cleveland, reports use of ain't at 63% (n = 154) in copular, present progressive, and periphrastic future environments combined and 71% (n = 29) in the perfect environment. The present tense environment, at 65% (n = 41) in her data, is the only one that deviates from the UMLC findings.

Though most contexts show the expected pattern of speakers born prior to 1944 using ain't less than those born in and after 1945, these differences are not statistically significant. The only exception is the present progressive environment where the oldest cohort uses ain't significantly less than both younger cohorts (both at the p < 0.01 level).Footnote ⁷ The same pattern of age-grading is not found between the early/conservative varieties of AAE and contemporary varieties discussed previously (Howe, Reference Howe and Iyeiri2005), which may stem from the fact that, in earlier work, the copular, present progressive, and periphrastic future environments were combined. However, it is unclear why speakers would treat this particular context, which has existed in varieties of English for centuries, differently than others.

Overall, these results demonstrate relative stability over time in the use of ain't in these five contexts, in contrast to an increase over time in the use of ain't in the past tense. A consequence of this discrepancy in rates of ain't between past tense and other contexts is that younger speakers are more likely to have similar rates of use across all contexts while older speakers have high rates in most contexts except the past tense. For example, Mr. Valentine, born in 1901, uses ain't for didn't only 8% of the time but uses ain't in other contexts 79% of the time. In contrast, Paula, who was born in 1964, uses ain't for didn't (88.2%), just as much as she uses it in other contexts (90%). A speaker like Malika, born in 1951, has a more moderate separation in rates (12.5% in past, 42.9% in other). This differentiation between older and younger speakers’ patterns of use across contexts holds over the entire set of data and is shown in Figure 5, where speakers’ use in the past tense over time is compared to their use in all other contexts combined. Figure 5 is essentially Figures 1 and 3 overlaid. Individual speaker's rates of ain't in the past tense (black points) are shown for thirty-seven speakers, while rates for other contexts (gray points) are shown for twenty-seven. A total of twenty-five speakers are plotted for both environments. The three speakers discussed above are labeled twice for reference and to highlight their use in both past tense and other contexts.

Figure 5. Individual speaker's rates of ain't in past contexts (black points) for thirty-seven speakers and other contexts (gray points) for twenty-seven speakers. Twenty-five speakers (including labeled speakers) appear twice to show their rates in both contexts. The p-value and adjusted R² values for each regression can be found in Figure 1 and 3 above. Labeled speakers illustrate that differences in rates of use between the two contexts decrease commensurate with speaker age.

In sum, change in the past tense context is also signified by the fact that younger speakers have integrated the past tense use of ain't into their grammars, using it at similar rates across all contexts, regardless of tense-aspect value.

To compare the social, stylistic, and linguistic constraints on use of ain't in these five contexts to the results above for the past tense, data for the five established uses of ain't were also fit to a generalized linear model over 906 observations of negative auxiliary variants for all forty-two speakers. Results are shown in Table 5.

Table 5. GLM predicting use of ain't versus other negative variants across sociostylistic and linguistic conditions in five nonpast tense contexts combined for forty-two speakers (906 total tokens of ain't and auxiliary variants)

Social and stylistic factors

The age results confirm that there is no change over time for these variables. The gender profile, with men using more ain't, in addition to the fact that there is no change over time, is expected for a nonstandard variant in a situation of stable variation (Labov, Reference Labov2001) and also aligns with previous findings for ain't (Antieau, Reference Antieau, Donaher and Katz2015; Feagin, Reference Feagin1979). Interestingly, Philadelphia speakers disfavor ain't compared to southern speakers, which contrasts with results from the past tense, where Philadelphia speakers were found to favor use of ain't. This finding suggests that northern speakers may be the ones advancing the increase in use of ain't in the past tense.

Finally, the sociostylistic profile of ain't as a vernacular variant is confirmed here again with ain't favored by speakers without higher education and in contexts where negative concord is also used. With respect to sociostylistics, ain't is most likely a unified variant when it comes to social meaning, regardless of grammatical context.

Linguistic factors

Preceding vowel also favors use of ain't in these five contexts, again reflecting an abundance of preceding pronouns ending in vowels. However, this time, preceding pause also significantly favors ain't. This finding highlights a distinction between ain't as used in past tense and other contexts. In established contexts, especially the copular environment, ain't is used more frequently utterance-initially in questions (9a), negative inversion constructions (9b), and following a deleted subject pronoun (9c). There are sixty-four utterance-initial negated auxiliaries in established contexts; sixty-one of these contain ain't.

1. (9)

   1. (a) Ain't he too short? [Val, f, age 38/1944]

   2. (b) Ain't nothin in them drawers belong to you. [Vanessa, f, age 25/1957]

   3. (c) Ain't even lost one yet! [Ron, m, age 40/1942]

In the past tense data on the other hand, out of only eighteen utterance-initial auxiliary tokens, only one is ain't—most are didn't—and it is a negative inversion construction followed by another use of ain't (10).

1. (10) Ain't nobody beat me up. Ain't nobody gon beat me up. [Andrew, m, age 27/1954]

Though utterance-initial auxiliaries are rare in this data in general, the lack of tokens of ain't in past tense contexts is striking and perhaps another sign of its emergent use.Footnote ⁸

Verbal stativity was not included in the model as a whole, but was looked at in present perfect sentences that expressed anterior meaning, where ain't varies with haven't/hasn't. As before, examples of both stative and dynamic verbs are found following ain't in this context (11).

1. (11)

   1. (a) Bill ain't never been away from home. [Betty, f, age 66/1915]

   2. (b) In Alabama the only way a woman can get alimony is if she married a man and never worked in her life, and if he has a, a job where he can afford that, then she can get it, but […] if she ain't ever worked in her life […] and he ain't ever really work(ed), it's, it's kind of hard for that to happen. [Vanessa, f, age 25/1957]

Within this context, no preference was found for verbal stativity following either auxiliary, but the overall low token count in this domain, particularly following haven't/hasn't, makes it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions one way or the other.

On the other hand, we now have the opportunity to compare the distribution of verbs by stativity following ain't in both anterior and past/perfective contexts directly. Recall that DeBose (Reference DeBose1994) proposed that dynamic verbs following ain't always give rise to past/perfective interpretations and stative verbs are always interpreted as anterior. According to DeBose, if this is true, it provides evidence that ain't in AAE is a tense-aspect neutral negator and that the meaning of each sentence is derived, not from the neutral auxiliary, but from the stativity of the following verb. Already, both this paper and Weldon (Reference Weldon1994) have found both stative and dynamic verbs following ain't in past/perfective and anterior contexts. However, in the Philadelphia data there is a significant correlation between the tense-aspect meaning of ain't sentences and verbal stativity, again in partial alignment with DeBose, such that uses of ain't in the past tense are significantly more likely to be followed by dynamic verbs, while anterior uses are significantly more likely to be followed by stative verbs (Table 6).

Table 6. Distribution of stative and dynamic verbs following ain't in past tense and present perfect environments (Chi-squared test, p < 0.001)

Though this distribution is not categorical, it is consistent with a weaker interpretation of DeBose's hypothesis, the ramifications of which will be taken up in the following section.