Present accounted for: Prosody and aspect in early African American English.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English (AAE) by investigating the linguistic factors conditioning several variables within the domain of present temporal reference in three varieties argued to be representative of Early AAE. The first half concerns the variable contraction and deletion of the copula, studies of which have used the following grammatical category to ascribe a creole origin to AAE, while downplaying the equally significant subject-type constraint. Arguing that both effects are epiphenomena of constraints dictated by prosodic structure, I show that the complexity of the phonological phrase constrains both contraction and deletion across all three varieties. Thus, the early African Americans exploited a possibility inherent in the English language once contraction developed. The second half concerns verbal predication in the present temporal reference domain, previous studies of which have focussed only on the opposition between bare verbs and verbs marked with --s, ignoring other morphosyntactic constructions. Expanding the analysis to the entire present temporal reference system, I demonstrate that different expressions of the present themselves convey different aspects: the previously-noted finding that --s marks habitual aspect is confirmed, but zero also marks aspect, that of duration. The progressive is used most often with nonstative verbs, to denote durative aspect, while its much rarer use with statives appears to reflect an older stage in its "grammaticization". Thus, these findings largely comply with the literature on the history and use of the progressive in English. This reconstruction not only serves as further evidence in the history of the development of AAVE, it also demonstrates the utility of variationist analysis in resolving issues of system membership and genetic affiliation. Combining variationist analysis with current advances in linguistic theory, it provides linguistically meaningful explanations of the observed variability and places it within the context of the development of the English language.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".