This article investigates exemplars of the transitive be perfect in Canadian English, such as I am done dinner and I am finished my homework. I report on an experimental study of acceptability judgments of this construction, given by speakers of Canadian English primarily recruited from the Calgary area. I claim that the construction [be done NP] is characterized by preference for the animacy of the subject, preference for definiteness of the direct object, open-endedness of the direct object slot, and limited variability of the participle. I conclude that [be done NP] is a partially schematic construction that is close to a “prefab”.

This article offers a syntactic analysis of the construction [be done NP], e.g. I am done dinner, I am finished my homework, as found in Canadian English and some US dialects. After situating this construction in the context of a productive transitive be perfect in Scots/English dialects, [be done NP] will be distinguished from a set of its conceptual and structural relatives, and ultimately be shown not to be reducible to a surface realization of another underlying structure. From the perspective of syntactic theory, the article problematizes the parsimony of the mainstream generative approach (most recently in MacFadden & Alexiadou 2010) in accounting for the facts of [be done NP] on strictly compositional grounds, as well as the mainstream view of lexical items as projecting theta grids and subcategorization frames (as e.g. in Grimshaw 1979; Emonds 2000). Following Fillmore et al. (1988), Goldberg (1995, 2005) and others, what will be suggested instead is a construction grammar approach to [be done NP], under which a construction holistically licenses its argument structure. Along these lines [be done NP] will be characterized as an abstract construction with some fixed material.

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