Heard on The Judges, etc.

[Wilson Gray]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 9:37 PM, Gordon, Matthew J.
<GordonMJ at missouri.edu> wrote:
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> Poster: Â  Â  Â  "Gordon, Matthew J." <GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Heard on The Judges, etc.
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> This is an interesting example. According to some descriptions, 'steady' is incompatible with stative verbs. In fact Lisa Green gives the example "*They steady having money" as ungrammatical in her book on AAE. The claim is that "steady" describes "an activity [that] is carried out in an intense or consistent manner." It seems, however, that the use of "been" works to make "steady" acceptable here. Green suggests, in reference to the "habitual be" that "They be steady having money" is grammatical b/c the "be" promotes an activity reading. I'm not sure, but I wonder if in the example Wilson cited, the implication is that the boyfriend has been taking her car out regularly rather than it having been in his possession for the duration. Wilson, do you have any intuitions about this?
>
> The word order is also different from other examples in the literature, which have BE steady Ving, but those examples are all of invariant 'be.'
>
> -Matt Gordon
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Wilson Gray [hwgray at GMAIL.COM]
> Sent: Monday, June 13, 2011 7:16 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Heard on The Judges, etc.
>
> Twenty-ish, black female speaker:
>
> "My sister boyfriend, who _steady been having_ her car ..."
>
> I.e.,
>
> "... is the person who ordinarily has had her car in his possession ..."
>
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"*They steady having money" [i]s ungrammatical

I agree. IME, a more-usual grammatical version is

"They *keep(s)* money."

FWIW, I prefer

"They steady be having money."

Further IMO,

_Keep(s) money_ is Rockefeller-like in its majesty - these "they" are
wealthy - whereas _steady be having_ implies that there may be times
when those "they" *don't* have money, but only because they are, for
the moment, "spent out" - is that standard? - and those times are so
few and far between that, in the real world, they steady be in the
position to help a brother out. In either case, the source of income
is uninterruptible.

"They be steady having money"

is, for me, saying that "they" have a successful hustle, get a welfare
check, have a civil-service job, or have some other only
reasonably-predictable source of income. But you never know. "They
"attempt to hustle a plain-clothes cop, the welfare check gets stolen,
the civil servant gets laid off.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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