Auxiliary Structures and Time Adverbs in Black American English

Abstract

IN RECENT YEARS, black American English (also called Negro nonstandard English) has received a great deal of attention from researchers. From the original position that black English is simply the dialect of the region in which black speakers happen to reside (Pederson 1968), there has been a change toward realization that different varieties of English are spoken by economically disadvantaged Negroes and by other residents of the same areas (including middle-class Negroes and white speakers of nonstandard dialects). Recent behavioral tests (Baratz 1969; Baratz, Shuy, and Wolfram 1968; Tucker and Lambert 1969) have shown that respondents are capable of identifying informants as black or white from auditory cues only (that is, from listening to the taped speech of those informants) with a degree of success ranging from 73 to 82 percent. A higher percentage of success in terms of color of the informants alone would not be expected, since socioeconomic factors other than ethnic group membership enter into the identification of speakers of black American English. A question arises as to what degree of difference there is. The conventional assumption is that the differences are phonological and lexical only, since that is the usual assumption about the relationship between dialects (Saporta 1965). Several recent studies have drawn conclusions about the phonological relationships without considering the syntactic relationships at all (Houston 1969). Other studies have found syntactic differences (Loflin 1967, 1969). The resolution of this conflict is obviously basic to further serious work on black English. In our approach to this problem, we assume-as appears to be necessary in terms of current theory-that a language is a symbol system in which meaning symbols are postulated in equivalence relations with sound symbols. Meaning symbols represent an internal cognitive phenomenon and sound symbols represent an overt behavioral phenomenon. If the system of meaningsound relations of black English is identical to that of standard English (except for a few trivial differences, which can be accounted for in the