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

[Benjamin Torbert]

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 8:56 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
>

This makes sense.  And here, the difference in focal stress is because of
the contrast of BE working and STAY working.  Which is the point of the
whole statement.

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