Habitual Structures among Blacks and Whites in the 1990s

Abstract

SINCE THE MID-1960s, MANY LINGUISTS have been involved in the process of uncovering the particular structures and patterns of Black English Vernacular (BEV). In 1986, John R. Rickford initiated the East Palo Alto Neighborhood Survey (EPANS) to investigate the changes that have taken place in BEV since the earlier studies were done and to provide current data relevant to the question of whether black and white dialects are presently converging or diverging (see, e.g., Bailey and Maynor 1987, 1989, Butters 1989, Rickford 1987, Wolfram 1990). East Palo Alto, California, is 61 percent black and 11.5 percent white, and has many BEV speakers. Using sociolinguistic interviews done by members of the EPA community, EPANS project researchers have gathered a large body of data on phonological and syntactic features of current BEV, as well as data on white speakers from the same area (see Rickford 1988, 35-36).l I used EPANS data from black and white speakers to study the expression of habituality among East Palo Alto speakers. My strategy was to provide quantitative evidence on how BEV speakers expressed habituality, in order to compare this data with that from white and Standard American English (SAE) speakers from the same area. Because habitual invariant be (be2) is one of the salient linguistic features that distinguishes Black English Vernacular, it figured greatly in earlier studies (e.g., Labov et al. 1968; Wolfram 1969). However, the differences between how the SAE and BEV aspectual systems express habituality include many factors apart from the presence or absence of this unique form. Rather than analyzing be2 alone, I have looked at where this form fits into the entire schema of habitual expression, investigating not only how be2 is used, but also what effect it has had on the rest of the BEV habitual structures. The data found in the EPA sample show the following: (1) for habituals, the black speakers are using fewer simple present tense verbs and copula forms than the white speakers; (2) the black speakers are using used to more often than white speakers; (3) in BEV, stative verbs can easily take the progressive with the be2 construction (SAE statives rarely take the progressive); and (4) frequency adverbials (such as always, often, never) co-occur more often with the white speakers' habituals than with the black speakers' habituals. The nature of be2 itself as it appears in the recent EPA data has significance apart from any comparisons with SAE. Labov et al. (1968) were