"being have"

[Pearsons, Enid]

Isn't there a certain amount of apheresis documented for AAVE that would
account for the dropping of the initial syllable in "behave"?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: George Thompson [mailto:george.thompson at NYU.EDU]
> Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 1:43 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "being have"
>
>
> This debate is going beyond what I had anticipated.
>
> In the context of the song, "She just won't have" undoubtedly
> means "she just won't act in a decorous manner because she is too
> spirited, too full of the spirit of jazz".
>
> If we do not derive the statement "She just won't have" from the
> expression "be have" (= "act nice"), then from what idiom do we derive
> it?
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African
> Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Lynne Murphy <lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>
> Date: Friday, September 7, 2001 9:07 am
> Subject: Re: "being have"
>
> > --On Thursday, September 6, 2001 7:31 pm -0400 George Thompson
> > <george.thompson at NYU.EDU> wrote:
> >
> > > Lynne Murphy objects that in the passage
> > >     "She came in on the Charleston wave, / What I told
> you, she just
> > > won't have"
> > > "there's no 'be' there--so I don't think this is a case of 'to
> > be have'
> > > at all.  "
> > >
> > > But "will" (won't) is the future tense of "be".  So that in this
> > > instance the idea of "being have" is so assimilated that the
> > verb has
> > > been adapted.
> >
> > I don't see this at all.  I parse 'being haive' as be + adj or
> > adv, and one
> > can't saw "I won't happy" or "I won't there"--you've gotta have
> > the 'be'.
> >
> >
> > >
> > > I'll concede that this analysis/joke on of "behave" is
> sufficiently
> > > obvious that it may have been invented ndependently many times.  I
> > > think I don't concede that "she just won't have" should be read
> > as "she
> > > just won't 'have" ("behave" truncated of its first syllable).
> >
> > Yeah, Arnold's probably right on this point.
> >
> > Lynne
> >
> >
> >
> > M Lynne Murphy
> > Lecturer in Linguistics
> > School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
> > University of Sussex
> > Brighton BN1 9QH
> > UK
> >
> > phone +44-(0)1273-678844
> > fax   +44-(0)1273-671320
> >
>