Stativity and Copula Absence in AAVE

Abstract

The copula has been one of the most important sites for work on the origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In particular, the effects of the following grammatical environment on copula absence have been crucial in attempts by linguists to argue a creole origins hypothesis. 1 Almost thirty years of copula research have confirmed the ordering of gonna, V+ing, predicate locative/predicate adjective, and NP in the constraint hierarchy for the effects of the following grammatical environment on copula absence. The ordering of predicate locatives and adjectives has been a source of controversy, though, with different analyses finding different orderings for these environments. However, it is the ordering of predicate locative/predicate adjective with respect to one another that has been singled out by researchers as a key factor in determining a creole ancestry for AAVE. Scholars such as Baugh (1979( , 1980( ), Holm (1984, Rickford and Blake (1990), and Rickford (1998) have argued that an AAVE constraint ordering that shows higher copula absence rates for following predicate adjectives than for predicate locatives parallels similar constraints in Caribbean anglophone creoles, which would strongly suggest creole origins for AAVE. These researchers point to the fact that in African languages and in creoles such as Jamaican Creole and Gullah, adjectives are a subclass of verbs and consequently would not require a preceding copula (Holm 1984, 102).Research on diaspora varieties of AAVE, however, has called the creole constraint order (and the creole hypothesis) into question. Poplack and Sankoff (1987) show that the ordering of the following grammatical constraints on copula absence

“I DONT CARE ONE CENT WHAT [Ø] GOYING ON IN GREAT Britten”: BE-Deletion IN IRISH ENGLISH

“…> loc. > NP this hierarchy is robust across the varieties included in rickford's (1998) survey and the later studies I have consulted: AAe (Cukor-Avila 1999;hazen 2000;Weldon 2003b;Wolfram 2003), earlier AAe (ewers 1996; kautzsch 2002); creoles (Weldon 2003b;Walker and Meyerhoff 2006;Meyerhoff and Walker 2007); eAes (fasold and Nakano 1996;hazen 2000) and Native American english (hazen 2000). Across these varieties, the generalization holds that auxiliary be is more likely to be deleted than copula be.…”

Unendangered Dialect, Endangered People: The Case of African American Vernacular English

“…Locative and adjectival environments are here combined, as in the original Harlem study (Labov et al 1968) where these were found to be variable from one group to another. Cukor‐Avila 1999 attributes this variability to varying proportions of stative and nonstative adjectives.…”