Abstract:
This dissertation contributes to the existing treatments of African-American English (AAE) by providing a new formal semantic account of the meanings of the AAE particles ‘preverbal’ done and ‘invariant’ be. The work presented here sheds much-needed light on both the semantic and distributional patterns of AAE sentences containing preverbal done and invariant be with respect to their unmarked counterparts. Pre verbal done and invariantbe are often understood as elements within a class of uninflected preverbal material unique to AAE. This class also includes perfect been, focused remote perfect BIN, and irrealis be done. Though they differ in the meanings assigned to each member, previous studies— from the early observations of Labov (1972) and Rickford (1975) to more recent investigations by Green (1993, 1998, 2000), Edwards (1991, 2001) Dayton (1996) and Terry (2004, 2006, 2010)—treat all members of this class as contributing the highlyspecified aspectual information that form the complex set of overt aspectual distinctions that are seen as the dialect’s distinguishing feature par excellence. This dissertation pivots from traditional views to cast the behaviors and contributions of two of these elements— done and be— in a new light.
