Re: THEORY: free variation [was: Re: [OT] Re: Conlangea Dreaming]

Patrick Dunn wrote:

> I still don't completely get the verb system though.  "She was knocking"
> is apparently simple past, not past progressive.
That could be contamination from Standard English, which of course is
pervasive in all registers of AAVE, right up to people who speak exactly
like their white neighbors except for little variants like final /T/
being [f].

The verb "knock" actually has two senses in StdE anyway, one inherently
progressive ("to strike a series of blows on a door or similar"), the other
not ("to strike a blow etc."): to knock, in the first sense, *is* to be
knocking, in the second sense.

>  "I be knocking" I'm not
> sure of.  Simple present?  Present progressive?
Habitual/customary. A well-known minimal pair is "He workin but he
don be workin" = "He's working now, but he's not regularly employed".

> I'd love to sit down with a speaker of Ebonics and listen to it, but my
> students are terrified to use it with me.  I guess they suspect that I'll
> tell them to speak proper English, whatever that is.
Not necessarily.  Most AAVE speakers, confronted with non-hostile white
authority, tend to approximate their interlocutor's dialect as much as
possible.

--
There is / one art                   || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
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