AAVE stressed BEEN interpretation

[Mai Kuha]

As an indirectly related follow-up to my recent question about BEEN, I'd
like to report an interesting finding from my English grammar class.

I explained to students in some detail the interpretation of stressed BEEN
in AAVE (as in Rickford 1999: with a stative or progressive, a process
that "began in the distant past and is still very much in force"; with a
non-stative not in the progressive, "a totally completed action in the
distant past").

As part of a homework assignment, I then asked for their responses to some
of the survey questions in Rickford 1999. In general, students tended to
come up with appropriate interpretations for BEEN, with one exception.
When asked whether "She BEEN married" means that she still is married, 35%
answered "no". (35%: 14 out of 40; 37 of the 40 are Caucasians from
various places in Indiana.)  (Since there are only two options to choose
from for this particular question, this is not spectacularly better than
results we might expect from random guessing.)

I wonder if this means that knowing a general principle in an unfamiliar
dialect doesn't allow listeners to interpret utterances reliably. In any
case, it seems that understanding structures in other dialects is even
more difficult than I'd realized.

-Mai
_____________________________________________
Mai Kuha                  mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu
Department of English     (765) 285-8410
Ball State University