A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE

Collins, Chris

doi:10.1075/cll.29.12col

In:Structure and Variation in Language Contact
Edited by Ana Deumert and Stephanie Durrleman
[Creole Language Library 29] 2006
► pp. 203–224

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A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE

Chris Collins | New York University, USA

Published online: 30 November 2006

https://doi.org/10.1075/cll.29.12col

In this paper, I describe the use of agentive be (‘If you don’t be careful, you will be caught’) in informal American English. I will show that agentive be has largely the same syntactic behavior as habitual be in AAVE (African American Vernacular English). Based on these similarities, I will conclude the paper by raising a number of questions about the origin of habitual be in AAVE.

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Cited by four other publications

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Miller, Philip & Peter W. Culicover

2025. Lexical be. Journal of Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff.

Sobin, Nicholas

2024. The lexical source of BIN and habitual be in African American English. Syntax

Bruening, Benjamin

2017. Subject–Auxiliary Inversion. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition, ► pp. 1 ff.

Fruehwald, Josef & Neil Myler

2015. I’m done my homework—Case assignment in a stative passive. Linguistic Variation 15:2 ► pp. 141 ff.

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