A sociolinguistic exploration of the usage of the aspectual marker done

in AAE in Detroit

Walter Edwards

Fri. 2:00-4:05 B

In Edwards (1991) I characterized African American pre-verbal done as an aspect marker that co-occurs almost exclusively with non-stative verbs and encodes the meaning of "current relevance of anterior" as proposed by Anderson (1982) and others. I also speculated that preverbal done and its related construction be done are typically used when the AAE speaker is overtly or covertly offering a negative evaluation of some phenomenon. Since the publication of my done article, Labov (1991) and Green (1993) have offered additional analyses of these two forms in which they raised interesting new questions about the meanings and syntax of these forms. Among other valuable insights, Green proposed that AAE done can sometimes be used with stative main verbs, and that done expressions differ from the Standard English present perfect in that the latter, but not the former can cooccur with adverbials that extend the scope of the verbal expression to the moment of speaking. Labov (1991) provided a number of sentences in which neither the completive nor intensive meaning usually associated with the preverbal done is available, and also provided evidence of semantic nuances that emerge from the use of done with telic and atelic verbs respectively. These two studies and the works cited in them encouraged me to attempt a more detailed examination of the semantics and coocurrence possibilities of preverbal done in Detroit AAE, and that is what I propose to do in this paper. In preparation for this effort I have assembled over sixty additional examples of aspectual done, and several examples of be done from the data I collected in 1988-89 from working class African American speakers in Detroit. I will use this enhanced data set to address the following issues: What are the various meanings that done encodes when it cooccurs with punctual, durative, telic and atelic main verbs respectively? With which stative verbs, if any, can done cooccur and with what meanings? What is the semantic relationship between the SAE have-en construction and done-V constructions? When speakers use sentences with have-en alongside sentences with the done-V formulation, are the latter constructions quantitatively more likely to be used with negative connotations than the former? Is the be-done construction best characterized as a future perfect, a "habitual completive" or a "future resultative" as have been variously suggested? I will provide comparative quantitative information about potential and realized done V and have-en variants in the ideolects of selected speakers, and demographic information about heavy done-V users.

References

Anderson, Lloyd. (1982) The 'perfect' as a universal and as a language-particular category. In Joan Hopper, ed. Tense-Aspect: Between semantics and pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Edwards, Walter 1991. A comparative description of the Guyanese Creole and Black English preverbal aspect maker "don". In: Edwards and Winford (eds.) Verb phrase patterns in Black English and Creole. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Green, Lisa. 1993. Topics in African American English: the verb system analysis. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Labov, William 1991. Coexistent systems in African-American English. Paper read at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago.