How Black EnglishPastgot to the present: Evidence from Samaná

Abstract

This article examines the tense system of Samana English, a lineal descendant of early nineteenth-century American Black English. Independent evidence from quantitative phonological, grammatical, and narrative analyses reveals the existence of a past tense marker comparable in surface form, function, and distribution to that of Standard English. In addition, we establish the presence of a narrative Historical Present, thus far unattested in Black English Vernacular (BEV), which appears in proportions and patterns of alternation with the past tense nearly identical to those associated with middle-class white American narrators. Comparison with varieties of contemporary BEV and English-based Creoles shows a structural resemblance between Samana" English and the former, but not the latter. These findings have important implications for understanding the development of contemporary BEV. (Linguistic variation, narrative analysis, Black English Vernacular, pidgin and Creole linguistics, Dominican Republic)

There's no tense like the present: Verbal -sinflection in early Black English

“…Though our early Black English data in (1) and (2) show the same apparently irregular distribution of -s attested in previous studies of contemporary VBE, featuring variable occurrence of verbal -s with subjects of all persons and numbers (I) 1 even in the speech of the same individual, as well as on nonfinite verbs and invariant be (2), our analyses suggest that its conditioning is more consistent with what (little) is known about the behaviour of this marker in (early and modern) White English than with English-based Creoles or contemporary VBE. This will corroborate our earlier independent findings on the grammars of Samana English (Poplack & Sankoff, 1987;Tagliamonte & Poplack, 1988).…”

“…The Samana data (but not the Ex-Slave Recordings) in Table 12 show a clear-cut tendency to retain -s on weak verbs, particularly in the 3rd p. This, of course, is precisely the context where it would seem most crucial to disambiguate present-tense verbs from those with deleted past-tense clusters: Weak verbs also showed most -t, d retention in these same materials (Tagliamonte & Poplack, 1988). 7.4.1.…”

“…Of course, the use of present-tense forms in narrative discourse (the Historical Present) has been widely attested (Schiffrin, 1981;Silva-Corvalan, 1983;Tagliamonte & Poplack, 1988;Wolfson, 1979); but as Labov (1987:8) points out, this innovative use of -s should not be confused with it (cf. Butters, in press).…”

“…We dedicate this article to the memory of the late Jose Vigo. Thus in two of the most widely studied areas of the verb system, pasttense expression and copula usage, investigators have shown, through comparison with varieties of White English (and in some cases English-based Creoles), that the underlying systems of VBE and SAE are similar in featuring the (same) copula and past-tense markers, though some of their surface manifestations are variably removed from VBE by the application of phonological and grammatical rules that can themselves be viewed as extensions of those operative in SAE (Baugh, 1980;Fasold, 1971Fasold, , 1972Labov, Cohen, Robins, & Lewis, 1968;Pfaff, 1971;Poplack & Sankoff, 1987;Tagliamonte & Poplack, 1988;Wolfram, 1969Wolfram, , 1974. The extent to which the results of these independent studies replicated each other was striking; they were in large part responsible for Labov's observation (1982: 178-79) that "by 1979, the field .…”

Counting and coding the past: Circumscribing the variable context in quantitative analyses of past inflection

“…The earliest analyses of past marking in AAVE (i.e., Fasold, 1972;Labov et al, 1968;Wolfram, 1969) as well as Patrick's (1991) article on Jamaican Creole (all shaded lightly) were primarily interested in syllable-final consonant cluster reduction and, therefore, included not only verbs but also words of other classes to which this process applies. By contrast, Tagliamonte (1991) and Tagliamonte and Poplack (1993) investigate "the entire past temporal reference system" of earlier AAVE, as represented in a Samaná corpus and the ex-slave recordings (cf. Bailey et al, 1991), in order to uncover this system's "underlying grammatical structure" (Tagliamonte, 1991:10) and thus the (creole or English) origins of the variety.…”