Perfectivity, BE syntax

[Dennis R. Preston]

Wilson's and now Margaret's observations highlight a much
underexplored area of tense-aspect in English - the use of particles
to indicate perfectivity and imperfectivity.

Notice how

I was eating on that hamburger for fifteen minutes

is a heck of a lot better than

I ate on that hamburger for fifteen minutes

although both are OK. That surely falls out from the fact that the
progressive fits better with imperfects and the plain preterite is
better with the perfective (not to be confused with the "perfect").
Notice how an even greater effort has to be made to make sense of

I was eating that hamburger up for fifteen minutes

where we highlight both the durational aspect of the activity with
the (progressive) but also the perfective aspect of it with "up."
Emotional coloring seems almost always to accompany these mismatches.

Further investigation of these particles, which are certainly not
unique to AA(V)E, might prove especially interesting in such
varieties, however, due to the special status of the habitual versus
momentary distinction with uninflected "be" where

He be eating hamburgers

means something like usually or all the time, but

He eating hamburgers

means right now or at the time of speaking.

I would certainly be interestd in the patterning of such
perfective-imperfective particles with this particular verbal aspect
fact about AA(V)E in the various forms suggested here:

He (be) eating on/up the hamburgers

So far as I remember, this has not been done (although work on the
aspectual sense of such particles is well-studied, particularly in
Slavic languages).

dInIs

PS: If Dwight Bolinger hasn't written about this somewhere, I'll eat my hat up.



>Regarding "eating on,"  I grew up in central VA (late 50's, early
>60's) hearing my parents use this to refer to a food that would last
>for several days, for example, "We will have these collards to eat
>on all week."
>
>Margaret Lee
>
>
>Wilson Gray <hwgray at EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
>One night, while listening to The Blues Express, a program carried by
>XPRS, a powerful, semi-legal radio station with its offices in Del Rio,
>TX, but with its transmitter located in Mexico, I heard the DJ say:
>
>"I'm just sitting here, eating me some potato chips."
>
>The very next night, I heard the same DJ say:
>
>"I'm just sitting here, eating on me a hamburger."
>
>FWIW, my intuition is that he made this distinction because potato
>chips come as relatively small, individual pieces that can be eaten in
>one bite, whereas a hamburger can be eaten only piecemeal, hence
>requiring several bites.
>
>-Wilson Gray
>
>
>Margaret G. Lee, Ph.D.
>Professor of English & Linguistics
>   and University Editor
>Department of English
>Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23668
>757-727-5769(voice);757-727-5084(fax);757-851-5773(home)
>margaret.lee at hamptonu.edu   or   mlee303 at yahoo.com
>
>---------------------------------
>Do you Yahoo!?
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--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic,
        Asian and African Languages
Wells Hall A-740
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
Office: (517) 353-0740
Fax: (517) 432-2736