Tense & Aspect Markers in African American English.

Abstract

Using grammaticalization and variationist sociolinguistic frameworks, this dissertation analyzes a subset of tense and aspect markers in two Louisiana dialects of African American English (AAE). This dissertation uses the grammaticalization framework to explain the historical development of future and perfect markers and the constraints on their distribution. A descriptive variationist framework is used to apply quantitative methods to the synchronic dialect data collected in Louisiana to reveal to what extent these constraints continue to affect speakers’ choice of one variant over another. This dissertation reveals that be going to and will are the most frequent variants and that be going to is the preferred means of indicating futurity overall. Less frequent variants are limited in distribution (e.g., be fixing to is largely restricted to expressing the immediate future). This dissertation further shows that speaker selection of present perfect forms depends on the function (e.g. hot news, existential, result state, and continuing states) for which the speaker uses the present perfect. Done leads in marking hot news, have in marking experientials, and the lone participle in marking continuing states. Done, have, and the lone participle are equally frequent for expressing result states. In addition, this dissertation provides a descriptive account of the habitual marker stay and the continuative marker steady, demonstrating that they occur in a larger range of syntactic structures and have a broader range of semantic uses than previously reported in the literature and that they can also indicate speaker evaluation.