AAVE stressed BEEN interpretation

[Dennis R. Preston]

This is being interpreted as the "perfect of experience" which,
unfortunately, does away with the "present relevance" part of the usual
ineterpretation of the present perfect. It'd "ordinary" in English all over
I believe.

E.g., I've been to California (but I'm not there right now).

dInIs

>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


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736