There's no tense like the present: Verbal -sinflection in early Black English

Abstract

This article contributes to the understanding of the origin and function of verbal -smarking in the Black English grammar by systematically examining the behaviour of this affix in two corpora on early Black English. To ascertain whether the variation observed in (early and modern Black English) -susage has a precedent in the history of the language, or is rather an intrusion from another system, we focus particularly on the linguistic and social contexts of its occurrence, within a historical and comparative perspective. Our results show that both third person singular and nonconcord-sare subject to regular, parallel environmental conditioning. The finding that bothinsertionanddeletionare conditioned by the same factors suggests that verbal-smarking is a unitary process, involving both concord and nonconcord contexts. Moreover, the (few) variable constraints on verbal-susage reported throughout the history of the English language remain operative in early Black English. These results, taken in conjunction with indications that-smarking across the verbal paradigm was a prestige marker in the dialect at some earlier point in time, lead us to hypothesize that the contemporary pattern might be a synchronic reflex of the constraint ranking on-susage in the varieties of English that provided the linguistic model for the slaves. Many of the conditioning effects we report would have been subsequently overridden by the grammaticalization of -sas the Standard English agreement marker. We conclude that present-tense marking via verbal -sformed an integral part of the early Black English grammar.