On The Articulation of Aspect in African American English.

235 Pages·2004·1.14 MB·English

ON THE ARTICULATION OF ASPECTUAL MEANING IN
AFRICAN-AMERICAN ENGLISH

A Dissertation Presented
by
JULES MICHAEL EUGENE TERRY

Submitted to the Graduate School of the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

May 2004
Department of Linguistics
© Copyright by Jules Michael Eugene Terry 2004
All Rights Reserved

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To my very first and very best teachers: my parents.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like many graduate students, while working on this dissertation I consulted – at times
possibly as a form of procrastination – a number of books on how to “successfully
complete a dissertation”. Three such books (one I bought, two that were given to me) are
set next to me as I write these very acknowledgements. They offer time-tested, practical
advice that varies remarkably little from text to text. All, for instance, recommend
keeping one’s committee as small as possible. The logic is clear: with fewer committee
members to satisfy, the odds of a timely completion are much greater. It is my good
fortune that I ignored that particular piece of advice. And if by ignoring it, my task in
writing this dissertation has been made any more difficult, I am all the better for it.
Indeed, I am grateful to all of the members of my committee for the attention they have
given to my work and to me.
Barbara Partee has been a wonderful chair. Throughout the course of my studies
she has given me guidance, support and encouragement the likes of which I could have
never even hoped for. The breadth and depth of her knowledge of philosophy and
linguistics continue to amaze me, as does her generosity; it is one thing to have such gifts,
quite another to share them so freely.
Likewise, Angelika Kratzer has, from the very beginning, instructed and inspired
me. My understanding and appreciation of the role of formalism in linguistic theory and
analysis not only developed, but, in a very real sense, began in her office. Her influence
on my development as a semanticist has been immense.
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More than anyone, Lisa Green has encouraged me to face the hard questions about
data: What should “count” as African-American English? What do differences in
judgments mean? Her willingness to share her knowledge of both linguistic theory and
African-American English has been invaluable.
The writing style I have adopted in this dissertation has been greatly influenced by
the presence of Tom Roeper and Harry Seymour on my committee. While at the
University, I was fortunate enough to work with them both on the development of the
Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV), a screening tool for speech
pathologists that differentiates normally developing speakers of African-American
English from African-American English speakers with Specific Language Impairment
(SLI) and normally developing Standard American English (SAE) speakers. In that
context and as committee members, they have impressed upon me the importance of the
linguistic study of African-American English to fields other than linguistics. Along with
their other valuable suggestions, they have encouraged me to do my best to write in a
style accessible to a variety of types of scholars.
The shape of this dissertation has also been influenced by Gary Hardegree, who,
as a committee member, unselfishly shared both his time and expertise. Each of his
questions and comments taught me something important.
In addition to the members of my committee, I am deeply indebted to my other
professors at the University, especially Peggy Speas, with whom I took my first
linguistics class, and Lyn Frazier and Roger Higgins, who both gave me valuable
comments on my work. Also, my fellow classmates have offered me advice and
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friendship that I could not have done without. I thank them all, especially Mako Hirotani,
Min-Joo Kim, Anita Nowak-Panlilio, Ana Arregui, Paula Menéndez-Benito, Pius
Tamanji, and Eva Juarros-Daussa. And as anyone who has ever passed through South
College knows, Lynne Ballard and Kathy Adamczyk are remarkable women. I thank them
for their indispensable help.
I am also grateful to my friends and family outside of the Linguistics community,
especially LaTonya Raines, Adé and Valerie Williams, and my parents, Eugene and
Esther Terry. And I would like to thank the community of Wise, North Carolina, whose
members have shared their language with me. Finally, I apologize to all those who
deserve my thanks but whose names are not mentioned here due to lack of space.

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ABSTRACT
ON THE ARTICULATION OF ASPECTUAL MEANING IN
AFRICAN-AMERICAN ENGLISH
MAY 2004
JULES MICHAEL EUGENE TERRY
B.S., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
M.S., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Ph. D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Directed by: Barbara H. Partee

This dissertation investigates the articulation of aspect in African-American English
(AAE). Its primary goal is the development of a formal semantics of AAE simple V-ed
sentences that explains their compositional interpretation and relationship to done V-ed
sentences. Building largely on the valuable works of Green (1993; 1998), Déchaine
(1993), Dayton (1996), the work herein supports the conclusions that AAE simple V-ed
sentences such as The frog done jumped are ambiguous, having both past perfective and
present perfect readings, and that AAE done V-ed sentences such as The frog done
jumped are unambiguously present perfect. Further, it identifies a distinction in meaning
between AAE simple V-ed perfects and done V-ed perfects. This distinction makes
untenable analyses of the simple V-ed ambiguity in which a silent done is responsible for
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contributing perfect aspect to the present perfect versions of these sentences. Instead, this
work traces the ambiguity to the presence of a covert present tense operator found in the
present perfect (but not past perfective) versions of simple V-ed sentences, and the
interaction of this operator with the –ed morpheme. In the proposed analysis, single AAE
–ed morpheme unambiguously denotes a temporal relation of precedence, contrasting
with the two distinct Standard American English (SAE) morphemes often notated as -ed
and -en and often argued to denote past and perfect respectively. When it interacts with a
covert present tense operator, AAE -ed contributes its precedence relation to the domain
of aspect, resulting in the perfect aspect relation (situation time precedes topic time).
When it is the highest tense/aspect marker in a sentence, it contributes its precedence
relation to the domain of tense, resulting in the past tense relation (topic time precedes
utterance time). On the proposed analysis, -ed thus makes the same semantic contribution
to simple V-ed sentences and done V-ed sentences on all of their readings. One
theoretically interesting result of this investigation is the finding that a semantically
unambiguous operator may contribute sometimes to the interpretation of aspect and
sometimes to the interpretation of tense.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. v
ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................….......…. viii
LIST OF TABLES ..............................................................................................……... xiii
LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................….................... xiv
CHAPTERS
1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 1
2. CORE DATA AND BASIC QUESTIONS .............................................................. 21
2.1 Questions of Form ............................................................................................. 22
2.1.1 Past Participles and AAE .................................................................... 27
2.1.2 Preverbal done as a Single Morphological Word ................................ 35
2.2 Questions of Meaning ...........................................................................…......... 43
2.2.1 Characterizing Tense and Aspect ........................................................ 48
2.2.1.1 done V-ed Sentences as Present Perfects .................................... 52
2.2.1.2 The Ambiguity of Simple V-ed Sentences ................................... 62
2.3 Summary ............................................................................................................ 65
3. DEVELOPING A FIRST FORMAL FRAGMENT ................................................. 67
3.1 Distinguishing Tense and Aspect ...................................................................... 68
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