In sub-section 3.3.1, the initial finding that there is change toward increased use of ain’t in the simple past context in PhAAE was confirmed. The model sheds light on the linguistic and social factors that condition the use of ain’t in this context. This subsection will examine the linguistic factors shown to condition the use of ain’t in more detail.
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Variant ~ scale(YOB) * Gender + Education + Region + Interview Type + Negative Concord + Verbal Stativity + Preceding Segment + Temporal Expression
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These factors include the phonological segment preceding ain’t or didn’t and the stativity of the verb following ain’t or didn’t. The lack of significant results for temporal expressions will also be discussed in addition to a study of the distribution of ain’t vs.
didn’t with regard to predicate lexical item, not included in the model.
3.3.3.1 Preceding Phonological Segment
Chapter 2 introduced Fasold and Wolfram’s (1970) hypothesis on the origin of ain’t for
didn’t. They posit that the use of ain’t in past tense contexts is due to the phonetic reduction of didn’t to in’t, which then converged with other uses of ain’t. To explain the mechanism of phonetic reduction, Rickford (1980) proposes an initial /d/-deletion rule whereby less sonorant segments (like obstruents and nasal consonants) promote deletion due to Consonant Cluster Deletion (CCD) while more sonorant segments (like vowels) promote /d/-retention. Weldon (1994) predicts that if this environment gave rise to the use of ain’t in the past tense, then we should find evidence of it in synchronic patterns of variation. In other words, we should find that ain’t is preceded most often by consonants. Accordingly, she investigates the effect of preceding segments on the use of ain’t for
didn’t among speakers of AAE in Columbus to test this hypothesis and finds that a preceding consonant does not promote the use of ain’t, though her results do not reach significance. This dissertation also tests the effect of the preceding phonological segment on the likelihood that a speaker will use ain’t vs. didn’t, but approaches the issue from another angle: if ain’t originated from the phonetic reduction of didn’t when it was preceded by consonants, then this environment should be robust enough in natural speech
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to result in the frequent application of the deletion rule. This would provide the necessary threshold of input for acquirers of AAE to reanalyze tokens of reduced didn’t as ain’t.
Recall that preceding phonological segment was coded as either vowel or consonant and that different types of consonant were grouped into one category. Results from the model, illustrated in Figure 13, show that, overall, preceding vowels favor the use of ain’t in past tense contexts as in Weldon’s study.
Figure 13: Rate of use of ain’t (y-axis) by preceding segment (x-axis).
This is the opposite of what is expected if the use of ain’t in the simple past originated from the phonetic reduction of didn’t due to consonant cluster deletion.
Labov (1969), in looking at contraction in MAE and copula deletion in AAE points out that the factors of Type of Subject and Preceding Phonological Segment are linked: the majority of English pronouns end in vowels (e.g., I, you, he/she, we, they). There are only a few that end in consonants (e.g., it, that). Indeed, as the UMLC corpus illustrates, the majority of tokens of both ain’t and didn’t were preceded by vowels, and
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this effect is driven by the prevalence of preceding subject pronouns in both contexts (Table 10 and Table 11).41
Preceding Segment Subject Pronoun Non-Subject Pronoun Total Consonant 40 (52%) 37 (48%) 77 Vowel 593 (97%) 20 (3%) 613 Total 633 57 690
Table 10: Cross-tabulations for subject type by phonological segment preceding didn’t.
Preceding Segment Subject Pronoun Non-Subject Pronoun Total Consonant 1 (20%) 4 (80%) 5 Vowel 184 (95%) 9 (5%) 193 Total 185 13 198
Table 11: Cross-tabulations for subject type by phonological segment preceding ain’t.
It is interesting to note that nearly all preceding consonants that are NOT subject pronouns are found preceding didn’t. The prevalence of subject pronouns in ain’t sentences coupled with the fact that ain’t is more likely to be preceded by a vowel calls into question whether the environment needed for Fasold & Wolfram’s (1970) theory of /d/-deletion was the primary origin of past tense ain’t, we would expect the environment favoring it (preceding consonants) to be robust enough for didn’t to be reanalyzed as
ain’t.
Fasold and Wolfram’s theory is further called into question based on results from an analysis of intermediate tokens—tokens like in’t that fall somewhere between ain’t and didn’t and may be the result of initial /d/-deletion of didn’t. As mentioned above, tokens of negated auxiliaries in past tense contexts that were intermediate between ain’t and didn’t were set aside for this analysis. These tokens represented only 6% of the data (N=52, added to the 888 observations of past tense tokens). Not all speakers produced intermediate tokens, while some speakers produced a few. No speaker produced more
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than 6 intermediate tokens. Four speakers (Gwen, Valerie, Buddy, and Donette) each produced between 4-6 tokens of in’t, and because this subset of the data is small, may be driving any effects seen here. Table 12 shows that speakers with low rates of use of ain’t for didn’t and speakers who grew up in Philadelphia produced the most intermediate tokens.
Speaker rate of ain’t for didn’t
Low (0-20%) Med (20-50%) High (50% <) Total
Philadelphia 9 12 15 36
South 15 0 0 15
Total 24 12 15 51
Table 12: Use of intermediate tokens by speakers’ rates of use of ain’t for didn’t (low, medium, or high) and speakers’ region of origin (Philadelphia or the South) for N=51 intermediate tokens (one speaker excluded).
The effect among speakers with lower rates of ain’t for didn’t is driven by speakers from the South. The most important takeaway from the data on intermediate tokens, however, is that 96% were preceded by a vowel, meaning that the use of in’t rather than didn’t is most likely not driven by initial consonant cluster deletion as Fasold and Wolfram (1970) and Rickford (1980) suggest. At least, the phonetic environment needed to produce such an effect does not seem to be robust enough in this data. The reduction of didn’t to in’t
may simply be a byproduct of fast speech. However, this would require further investigation.
3.3.3.2 Lexical Stativity
Chapter 2 introduced a second hypothesis for the origin of the use of ain’t for didn’t. According to this hypothesis, supported by Harris 2010 and Smith 2015, the use of ain’t in past tense contexts was the result of reanalysis of the use of ain’t in present perfect contexts. This reanalysis would have occurred due not only to overlap in the semantics of
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the past and present perfect but also due to the use of overlapping forms: preterit forms are used following ain’t in the present perfect (They ain’t played outside since
Wednesday) as well as in affirmative simple past sentences (They played outside yesterday). Additionally, this hypothesis argues that this reanalysis would have been driven by the use of dynamic verbs with ain’t in present perfect environments. Recall from Chapter 2 that DeBose (1994) proposes that main verbs following ain’t will convey past tense meaning when they are dynamic verbs and will convey present perfect meaning when they are stative verbs. DeBose bases this hypothesis on the Lexical Stativity Parameter (Mufwene 1983, DeBose and Faraclas 1993), which asserts that stative predicates are interpreted as non-past and non-completive, while non-stative predicates are interpreted as past and completive. While this dissertation agrees that stative predicates typically express continuation into the present in isolation (Comrie 1976), it does not take the strong view that DeBose does. This stance is further supported by results from Weldon (1994) showing that stative and dynamic verbs occur in both past and present perfect contexts. This dissertation will also test the effect of verbal stativity on the choice between ain’t or didn’t.
For lexical stativity, verbs were coded as either stative or dynamic according to their use in a given sentence using the tests described above to determine their status (Jackendoff 1983, Levin 2009). Results of the model and Figure 14 show that use of ain’t is favored when the predicate is a dynamic verb.
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Figure 14: Rate of use of ain’t (y-axis) by verbal stativity (x-axis).
While ain’t is used with both stative and dynamic verbs, it is used preferentially with dynamic verbs, offering support for the Lexical Stativity Parameter and DeBose’s idea that there is a link between dynamic verbs and simple past interpretations in AAE. Once again, however, the result is not categorical. More importantly, though, these findings are expected given the hypothesis set forth in Chapter 2. This hypothesis stated that the use of dynamic verbs following ain’t would have driven the reanalysis of ain’t as conveying past tense meaning because stative verbs are more likely to be interpreted as continuing into the present. This means that stative verbs may be more conducive to conveying perfect meaning and dynamic verbs more conducive to conveying perfective meaning (Comrie 1976). Thus, it is expected that dynamic verbs would be used more frequently in sentences that convey past perfective meaning.
If the use of ain’t in past tense contexts originated from ain’t sentences expressing present perfect aspect with dynamic verbs, it might further be expected that older
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speakers are driving this preference for dynamic verbs and younger speakers are more likely to use either stative or dynamic verbs in this context at similar rates. To test this, speakers were grouped into age cohorts of “younger than 30” and “30 and older”. Results in Figure 15 shows that both older and younger speakers maintain higher frequencies of
ain’t with dynamic verbs compared to stative verbs.
Figure 15: Rate of use of ain’t (x-axis) by verbal stativity (black = dynamic, gray = stative) and age (y-
axis).
On the other hand, these results might simply reflect the fact that, when ain’t is used as an auxiliary, verbs must do some of the work formerly taken up by auxiliaries like didn’t and haven’t that clearly express tense/aspect meaning. Because didn’t itself expresses default perfective aspect (since perfective is the default aspect for the past tense in English), when ain’t is used instead, dynamic verbs are more likely to be used because they are better able to convey perfective aspect on their own. The reverse would be true
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for stative verbs. When used with ain’t, they would be preferred in perfect contexts because they are able to convey the idea of continuation up to the present in absence of
haven’t, which would normally take on that role. Likewise, this result also bears on the hypothesis that the use of ain’t in variation with don’t before got is the origin of the use of ain’t for don’t and didn’t. In Chapter 2, this hypothesis was deemed implausible because, other than with the predicate got, ain’t does not occur frequently enough in this environment in the corpus. Beyond that, reports of variation between ain’t and don’t with predicates other than got report that it is used primarily with stative predicates (Howe 2005). Thus, if the use of ain’t for didn’t originated from the use of ain’t for don’t, which favors stative predicates, we might expect to see a similar effect for stativity here. In other words, we might expect ain’t to be used more often with stative verbs in the past tense, yet this is the opposite of what we find.
3.3.3.3 Temporal Expressions
Chapter 2 discussed the fact that the simple past and present perfect are distinct in the types of temporal expressions thy can co-occur with. Specifically, the English present perfect cannot co-occur with temporal expressions that express past meaning, even when the event described in the sentence took place in the past (Klein 1992).42 Additionally, the use of ain’t for negation obscures tense/aspect distinctions that are apparent when an auxiliary like haven’t or didn’t is used. For this reason, it might be expected that use of
ain’t prompts speakers to use more temporal expressions that would disambiguate
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It is noteworthy (see Chapter 5) that this is also a means of distinguishing between past and perfect uses of the passé composé in French (Sankoff and Thibault 1977).
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tense/aspect meaning. However, this study finds no evidence that temporal expressions are used more frequently with ain’t than with didn’t. In past tense contexts, ain’t is accompanied by a temporal expression only 16% of the time, and didn’t only 8%. Additionally, the majority of temporal expressions used in conjunction with ain’t in the past tense can also be found in use with ain’t in present perfect contexts: 19 out of 32 expressions are never.43
3.3.3.4 Predicate Lexical Item
Predicate lexical item was not included in the model due to the low frequency of most verbs (providing only 1 token each). As a result, whether certain main verbs tend to collocate with ain’t rather than didn’t and whether higher frequency verbs favor one or the other past tense auxiliary variant was not tested in the model. However, Table 13
shows that ain’t is used with the top 10 most frequent verbs at roughly the same rate that it is used in the general population (22%). The category of “Verb” in Table 13 combines all morphological forms of a given verb used in the past tense context.
Rank Verb N = % used foll. ain’t 1 have 125 19% 2 know 110 19% 3 want 73 23% 4 say 53 51% 5 get 51 24% 6 do 49 33% 7 go 28 29% 8 like 27 7% 9 tell 27 30% 10 see 23 26%
Table 13: Top 10 most frequent main verbs following a past tense auxiliary w/ rate of use following ain’t.
43 In contrast, 79% of sentences containing ain’t in present perfect contexts also contain a temporal
expression. Though never is also popular, representing 61% of temporal expressions in the present perfect context, there are also others associated with perfect meaning like since and yet.
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The rate of use following ain’t is slightly elevated for more dynamic verbs (e.g., do, go, tell). There are two verbs whose rates of use following ain’t deviate from the norm: say is used following ain’t roughly half of the time, while like follows ain’t only 7% of the time. The higher use of say following ain’t could speak to the use of ain’t in narratives. The low frequency of like following ain’t is telling in light of Labov’s (1996) finding that speakers are least likely to choose didn’t like as a possible meaning for ain’t like. In Labov’s study, Black speakers with both high and low contact with the White community chose didn’t like as a possible meaning less than 5% of the time compared with isn’t like and doesn’t like. Consequently, like may be disprefered with ain’t in past tense contexts.
To summarize, this subsection has looked at the linguistic factors conditioning the use of ain’t in simple past contexts. An investigation of the effect of preceding phonological segment demonstrated that ain’t is most likely to be preceded by a vowel in this grammatical context. The fact that subject pronouns, and therefore preceding vowels, are used most frequently preceding ain’t means that the environment needed for the reduction of didn’t to have given rise to ain’t may not have been robust enough to produce such a development. Conversely, an examination of the verbal stativity of main verbs following ain’t shows that ain’t is used more often with dynamic verbs. Considering that stative verbs in present perfect contexts are more likely to be interpreted as non-past and that dynamic verbs are likely to be interpreted as describing past events, this finding may lend support to the idea that present perfect uses of ain’t with dynamic verbs were reanalyzed as simple past in PhAAE. At the very least, it shows that dynamic
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verbs are used with ain’t in past tense contexts because they are better able to convey perfective aspect than stative verbs in the absence of tense/aspect cues from didn’t.
In the next subsection, the social conditioning on the use of ain’t will be explored.