"He BE working. He just don't STAY working."

[Laurence Horn]

On Feb 7, 2013, at 5:15 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:

> On Feb 7, 2013, at 12:57 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 3:18 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>> This looks normal to me
>>
>> To me, too. I don't need a W:pedia cite to persuade me of that. What's
>> your point? That black speech is now non-distinct from standard
>> speech? That's not so.
>>
>
> My point is that I didn't think there was anything unusual about it, so I was wondering why it was posted and had two words capitalized as though something were unusual.

I thought the caps were to indicate contrastive focal stress. There's another verbal marker in AAE/BE, "BIN" (for remote past), that is always capitalized because (according to a presentation on it I just heard today by one of our grad students who will be posting it as a page on the Yale Grammatical Diversity site soon) it always gets focal stress.

LH

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