Habitual ''be'', also called invariant ''be'', is the use of an
uninflected ''be'' in
African-American English
African-American English (or AAE; also known as Black American English, or Black English in American linguistics) is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers t ...
(AAE),
Caribbean English
Caribbean English (CE, CarE) is a set of dialects of the English language which are spoken in the Caribbean and Liberia, most countries on the Caribbean coast of Central America, and Guyana and Suriname on the coast of South America. Carib ...
and
certain dialects of
Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English (from Latin ''Hibernia'': "Ireland"), and in ga, Béarla na hÉireann. or Irish English, also formerly Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland (including both the Republic of Ireland a ...
to mark
habitual or extended actions in place of the
Standard English
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service a ...
inflected forms of ''be'', such as ''is'' and ''are''. In AAE, use of ''be'' indicates that a subject repeatedly does an action or embodies a trait. In
General American English
General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans. In the United States it is often perceived as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or so ...
, however, the use of (an inflection of) ''be'' means only that an individual has done an action in a particular tense, such as in the statement "She was singing" (the habitual is "She sings").
In
South-West Hiberno-English, the habitual takes a different form, with do being added to the sentence as a supplement. Instead of saying "She is late" or "They are always doing that," "She do be late" and "They always be doing that" are used. It is descended from the
Irish language
Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was ...
, which uses the verb ''Bí'', the habitual tense of the verb "to be".
It is a common misconception that AAE simply replaces ''is'' with ''be'' across all tenses, with no added meaning. In fact, AAE uses ''be'' to mark a habitual
grammatical aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to ...
, which is not explicitly distinguished in Standard English. For example, ''to be singing'' means ''to sing habitually,'' not ''to presently be singing.'' In one experiment, children were shown drawings of
Elmo
Elmo is a red Muppet monster character on the long-running PBS/ HBO children's television show ''Sesame Street''. A furry red monster who has a falsetto voice and illeism, he hosts the last full five-minute segment (fifteen minutes prio ...
eating cookies while
Cookie Monster
Cookie Monster is a blue Muppet character on the long-running PBS/ HBO children's television show ''Sesame Street.'' In a song in 2004, and later in an interview in 2017, Cookie Monster revealed his real name as "Sid". He is best known for hi ...
looked on. Both
Black
Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white ...
and
white
White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White o ...
subjects agreed that Elmo ''is'' eating cookies, but the Black children said that Cookie Monster ''be'' eating cookies.
Hypothesized sources
The source of habitual ''be'' in AAE is still disputed. Some linguists suggest it came from the finite ''be'' in the 17th-to-19th century English of British settlers (perhaps especially those from
South West England
South West England, or the South West of England, is one of nine official regions of England. It consists of the counties of Bristol, Cornwall (including the Isles of Scilly), Dorset, Devon, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire. Cities ...
, but the usage may be the recent "
Mummerset
Mummerset is a fictional English dialect supposedly spoken in a rustic English county of the same name. Mummerset is used by actors to represent a stereotypical English West Country accent while not specifically referencing any particular county. ...
" in this context). Other linguists believe that it came from
Scots-Irish immigrants, whose
Ulster Scots dialects
Ulster Scots or Ulster-Scots (', ga, Albainis Uladh), also known as Ulster Scotch and Ullans, is the dialect of Scots spoken in parts of Ulster in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.Gregg, R. J. (1972) "The Scotch-Irish Dialect Bo ...
mark habitual verb forms with ''be'' and ''do be''.
One hypothesis is that habitual ''be'' simply diffused into New World Black English from
Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English (from Latin ''Hibernia'': "Ireland"), and in ga, Béarla na hÉireann. or Irish English, also formerly Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland (including both the Republic of Ireland a ...
(HE) through contact in the Caribbean. Evidence includes the fact that both dialects structure sentences with the habitual ''be'' almost identically:
(1) ''Even when I do be round there with friends, I do be scared.'' (HE)
(2) ''Christmas Day, well, everybody be so choked up over gifts and everything, they don't be too hungry.'' (AAE)
Criticism of that hypothesis stems from the fact that there is no evidence that ''be'' has been used as a habitual marker either in the past or today in Caribbean
creoles of English.
Instead, Caribbean English uses the preverbal ''does'' to mark habitualness. They use ''be'' only as filler between ''does'' and the sentence's predicate.
The hypothesis states that the geographical differences in use of ''be'' and ''do (be)'', in Northern and Southern HE respectively, accounts for the difference in use of be and does (be) in AAE and Caribbean English respectively.
In the 17th and the 18th centuries, Northern HE speakers immigrated more to North America, and Southern HE speakers immigrated to the Caribbean Islands, both working alongside blacks. Although the expansion to include the differences in the dialects of HE accounts for the absence of habitual be in Caribbean English creoles, the hypothesis has its disadvantages as well. The first problem is the distribution of ''do'' and ''be'' again. In Southern HE, ''do'' is more common with ''be'' than other verbs, but in Caribbean English, ''does'' is less common with ''be'' than other verbs.
Hibernian English marks habitualness with ''be'', and Caribbean English rarely marks it, if at all. A second problem is that there is not sufficient evidence to show that Southern HE speakers did not introduce ''do (be)'' to the American colonies since there were Southern HE speakers in the colonies who worked closely with Black people.
A further expansion and modification of the diffusion hypotheses account for the periphrastic ''do'' found in Caribbean English creoles. The feature was common in British English and persisted in the nonstandard Southern and Southwestern English dialects that were used by the white colonials in the Caribbean colonies.
Irish and Black people both learned English at the same time, and both groups learned a new language and retained the conventions of their native languages. In America, the Irish feature habitual be may have diffused into AAE and the two assemblages of people were in close contact and communicating with a new tongue. It is possible that British dialects could have had features that served as models for habitual ''do (be)'' in the Caribbean creoles, which, in turn, expanded to AAE in the Americas. It is also worth noting that Southern and Southwestern British immigrants traveled to the American colonies as well and their dialects would have been used as a model to Black people, leading to a drawback, the introduction, and subsequent loss of habitual ''do (be)'' in America, which was also the problem with the first expansion of the diffusion hypothesis.
Another hypothesis for the origins of habitual ''be'' in HE and then into AAE is the most logical and the strongest of the lot.
The
decreolization
Decreolization is a postulated phenomenon whereby over time a creole language reconverges with the lexifier from which it originally derived. The notion has attracted criticism from linguists who argue there is little theoretical or empirical b ...
theory for the emergence of habitual ''be'' in AAE is the most likely and most supported of the theories of its origin. It involves the decreolization process of Caribbean English creole, with the loss of ''does (be)'', which itself is a decreolization of a previous creole habitual marker and its co-occurrence with ''be''.
The process is seen as one code-shifting in the series of English learned by blacks in the New World. The existence of a category of habituals in the native Caribbean languages at the basilectal level shows that over time, Black people learned English but kept the conventions of their native languages until code-shifting replaced the old conventions with new ones. Rickford gives evidence:
(18) Habitual aspect with a prepositional phrase or locative:
Stage 1: He (d)a de
cin the bed. (basilect)
Stage 2: He does de in the bed. (hab. (d)a -> does)
Stage 3: He does be in the bed. (loc. cop. de -> be)
Stage 4: He 0 be in the bed. (does -> 0; be 'habitual')
That set is just one of three; preceding a predicate containing a prepositional phrase, it shows the shifting from the basilectal, native language convention, level to the English habitual ''be'' level in stage 4, with the co-existence of two or more stages at once.
It is hypothesized that the first three stages were present in the speech of plantation slaves, and the hypothesis appears to be supported by the presence of these stages today on the
Sea Islands
The Sea Islands are a chain of tidal and barrier islands on the Atlantic Ocean coast of the Southeastern United States. Numbering over 100, they are located between the mouths of the Santee and St. Johns Rivers along the coast of South Carolina, ...
of the United States, with only stage four surviving anywhere else in America.
The advantages of this hypothesis are that there is no assumption that blacks had no native language influence and that the conventions of English were perfectly copied to their emerging English grammars and the fact that the decreolizing of habitual be also follows the pattern of decreolization in general linguistics and the pattern in cultural anthropology, with formal approximations of English over time and cultural assimilation of language respectively.
Another merit is that this same pattern of decreolizing of be is found in other creoles that are relatively close to AAE and affirm the plausibility of this origin for habitual be. Yet another merit for the hypothesis is that it can both incorporate the strong points of the revised diffusion hypotheses and surmount the weaknesses associated with them. For instance, creoles and dialects have lexicons that derive from the languages that feed them, and AAE and Caribbean English are no different by following the models of language dialects that came in contact with them and used their native language conventions as well as the newly learned conventions to mutate into varieties of the model language.
A possible disadvantage of the hypothesis is that it does not work for area in which creoles did not develop, such as areas of America with very few blacks in the population.
Another possible disadvantage is that the sources of slaves for the differing regions of America and the Caribbean could have led to different creole starting points, leading to the different habitual markers in AAE and Caribbean English creoles. Both minor problems are far outweighed by the advantages of the hypothesis, and they affirm that it is the best possible origin of habitual ''be''.
See also
*
English markers of habitual aspect
The habitual aspect is a form of expression connoting repetition or continuous existence of a state of affairs. In standard English, for the present time there is no special grammatical marker for the habitual; the simple present is used, as in ...
References
{{reflist
External links
* The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 200
"Be"* The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 200
Nonstandard English grammar
Sociolinguistics
African-American English