"He bes took up with a Yankee girl and moved up north. It's a shame in this world": The verb bes in the Carolinas and its history

Michael Montgomery & Margaret Mishoe

Sat. 11-12:40B

Other than Cynthia Bernstein's essay "A Variant of Invariant Be" published in American Speech in 1989, little attention has been given to bes as an inflected form of the copula verb in American English. Bernstein discusses social and syntactic dimensions of fifty citations of bes from black speakers in the Concordance of the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (the form was not used by whites) and concludes that it is a variant of be2, the so-called "invariant be." Scattered cases of the form in the literature on urban African American English in the 1960s/70s have been considered hypercorrections of the habitual form be2 that overlays a creole grammatical category with a superstratal inflectional marking and occurs erratically with subjects of different numbers and persons.

However, in northeastern South Carolina and Piedmont North Carolina bes is used frequently by white speakers, especially in Horry County, South Carolina, which has historically had almost no black population. This paper seeks to describe the social, semantic, and syntactic dimensions of this verb in Horry County, based on a corpus of approximately forty examples gathered there from natural conversation and on a series of elicitations given to a cross-section of natives of the county, black and white. While it appears that bes is used most often in third-singular contexts and primarily to convey habitual aspect, these are not always the case. In our South Carolina data the verb is used for both numbers and all three persons in the present tense, parallel to be2, and is used to convey habitual, durative, and perfective realities.

This paper also examines possible synchronic and diachronic sources of bes other than the hypercorrect extension of verbal -s to "invariant be." Apparently the only other place in the English-speaking world in which the form has occurred regularly is Ulster, where it is extremely common today. It can also be found in letters written home by emigrants from Ulster to North America in the nineteenth century, raising questions about the settlement history of Horry County. Nineteenth-century vernacular documents from semi-literate whites in the county, as well as data from Henry Hyatts' voodoo interviews in coastal South Carolina in the 1930s, provide additional evidence for the history of the finite verb forms be and bes there.