A matter of time: Past temporal reference verbal structures in Samana English and the Ex-Slave Recordings.

Abstract

This dissertation is based on two corpora of Black English. The first, the Samana English Corpus is a series of recorded conversations with very elderly residents of the Samana peninsula in the Dominican Republic. They are the descendants of American Ex-Slaves who immigrated there just after emancipation. The second, the Ex-Slave Recordings are interviews with American Ex-Slaves conducted in the 1930's. These corpora represent two, of the very rare, oral data bases which can tell us what Black English was like at an earlier point in time. The focus of our investigation was the past temporal reference system. Here, variable marking patterns among tense/aspect morphemes suggest that there are underlying differences between white and black varieties of English. We considered every verbal structure used to mark past time. This encompasses a wide range of different morphological types--base forms, e.g. I walk, suffixal inflections, e.g. I walked, suppletive forms, e.g. I went, pre-verbal items such as auxiliaries, e.g. I used to walk, as well as auxiliary/inflection combinations, e.g. I have walked/I have gone/I was walking. Many of these are used interchangeably, possibly as alternative semantic categories. Each of these forms was examined quantitatively with respect to many contextual features and from all areas of the grammar--phonology, syntax, semantics and discourse. Our results suggest some general patterns to temporal structure and organization. For example, we found that the existence of a preceding verbal mark was significant to all the variables we examined. An overt mark or no mark at all, led to more of the same. Such a counter-functional effect, although unattested in any English variety, is distinctly unlike a Creole system where overt marking is said to lead to unmarked forms. We concluded that there is very little evidence that the variable past temporal reference verbal structures in Samana English or the Ex-Slave Recordings can be attributed to Creole-like temporal organization. To the question of whether they represent English processes--there is little evidence that they do not. It remains to be seen, however, whether these results will be confirmed or contrasted in other Creole and/or English varieties (either Black or white). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)