Cover not available
Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 39:3 (2018) ► pp.278–308

You ain’t got principle, you ain’t got nothing

Verbal negation in Bahamian Creole

| Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
| Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

The present study investigates the system of verbal negation in Bahamian Creole and relates it to the respective systems of historically connected varieties in North America, i.e. contemporary as well as earlier varieties of African American Vernacular English and Gullah. Building on a corpus of roughly 98,000 words, the study provides a variable analysis of the all-purpose negator ain’t and its competitors and offers some remarks on invariant don’t, negative concord, and the preverbal past-tense negator never. It shows that in particular the syntactic and temporal distribution of ain’t, which have repeatedly been discussed in connection with the debate about the origins of African American Vernacular English, reveal striking similarities between Gullah and its immediate descendant Bahamian Creole, while confirming a more distant relationship with African American Vernacular English.

Keywords: Bahamian Creole, Gullah, African American Vernacular English, negation, ain’t , invariant don’t , negative concord, Varbrul multifactorial approaches, cluster analysis, logistic regression
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Bahamian Creole in its sociolinguistic context
  • 3.Negation in English: Forms, functions, and previous research
  • 4.Data and method
  • 5.Verbal negation in BahC: A descriptive and statistical analysis
    • 5.1 Ain’t as an all-purpose negator
      • 5.1.1 Ain’t as the negated form of be
      • 5.1.2 Ain’t as the negated form of have
      • 5.1.3 Ain’t as the negated form of do
    • 5.2Invariant don’t
    • 5.3Negative concord
    • 5.4The preverbal past-tense negator never
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00015.hac
References
Anderwald, Lieselotte
2002 “*I amn’t sure – Why Is There No Negative Contracted Form of First Person Singular Be?” In Dieter Kastovsky, ed. Anglistentag 2001, Wien. Trier: WVT, 7–17.Google Scholar
2005 “Negative Concord in British English Dialects”. In Yoko Iyeiri, ed. Aspects of Negation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 113–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 “Negation in Varieties of English”. In Raymond Hickey, ed. Areal Features of the Anglophone World. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 299–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Beryl L.
1966 Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek
1975 Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1996 “The Origins of Variation in Guyanese”. In Gregory R. Guy, Crawford Feagin, Deborah Schiffrin, and John Baugh, eds. Towards a Social Science of Language. Papers in Honor of William Labov. Vol. 11: Variation and Change in Language and Society. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 311–328.Google Scholar
DeBose, Charles E.
1994 “A Note on Ain’t vs. Didn’t Negation in African American Vernacular”. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 91: 127–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deuber, Dagmar
2014 English in the Caribbean: Variation, Style and Standards in Jamaica and Trinidad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feagin, Crawford
1979 Variation and Change in Alabama English. Washington: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred
1999 English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Green, Lisa J.
2002 African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie
2004 Urban Bahamian Creole: System and Variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie, and Magnus Huber
2007 “Gullah in the Diaspora: Historical and Linguistic Evidence from the Bahamas”. Diachronica 241: 279–325. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holm, John A.
1983 “On the Relationship of Gullah and Bahamian”. American Speech 581: 303. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Horn, Laurence R., and Heinrich Wansing
2016 “Negation”. In Edward N. Zalta, ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition) [URL] (accessed February 8, 2017).
Howe, Darin M.
1997 “Negation and the History of African American English”. Language Variation and Change 91: 267–294. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 “Negation in African American Vernacular English”. In Yoko Iyeiri, ed. Aspects of English Negation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 173–203. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Howe, Darin M., and James A. Walker
2000 “Negation and the Creole-Origins Hypothesis: Evidence from Early African American English”. In Shana Poplack, ed. The English History of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell, 109–140.Google Scholar
Kautzsch, Alexander
2000 “Liberian Letters and Virginian Narratives: Negation Patterns in Two New Sources of Earlier African American English”. American Speech 751: 34–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English: An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd, and Christoph Wolk
2012 “Morphosyntactic Variation in the Anglophone World: A Global Perspective”. In Bernd Kortmann, and Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 906–936. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd, and Kerstin Lunkenheimer
eds. 2013 The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology [URL] (accessed January 31, 2017).
Labov, William
1969 “Contraction, Deletion, and Inherent Variability of the English Copula”. Language 451: 715–762. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1972 “Negative Attraction and Negative Concord in English Grammar”. Language 481: 773–818. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Philip Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis
1968 A Study of the Non-Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City: Co-operative Research Report 3288. Vol. 1: Phonological and Grammatical Analysis. Washington: Office of Education.Google Scholar
McPhee, Helean
2003 “The Grammatical Features of TMA Auxiliaries in Bahamian Creole”. In Michael Aceto, and Jeffrey P. Williams, eds. Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 29–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mille, Katherine W.
1990 “An Historical Analysis of Tense-Mood-Aspect in Gullah Creole: A Case of Stable Variation”. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of South Carolina.Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko S.
1993 “Scope of Negation and Focus in Gullah”. In Francis Byrne, and Donald Winford, eds. Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 95–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 “The English Origins of African American Vernacular English: What Edgar W. Schneider Has Taught Us”. In Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber, and Alexander Kautzsch, eds. The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and Beyond. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 349–364.Google Scholar
2015 “Race, Racialism, and the Study of Language Evolution in America”. In Michael D. Picone, and Catherine Evans Davies, eds. New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Approaches. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 449–474.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu
1999 “Making the Best of ‘Bad’ Data: Evidence for Sociolinguistic Variation in Early Modern English”. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 1001: 499–533.Google Scholar
Paolillo, John C.
2013 “Individual Effects in Variation Analysis: Model, Software, and Research Design.” Language Variation and Change 251: 89–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, and Sali A. Tagliamonte
2000 “The Grammaticization of going to in (African American) English”. Language Variation and Change 111: 315–342. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
R Core Team
2017 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing [URL] (accessed June 02, 2017).
Reaser, Jeffrey
2004 “A Quantitative Sociolinguistic Analysis of Bahamian Copula Absence: Morphosyntactic Evidence from Abaco Island, the Bahamas”. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 191: 1–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reaser, Jeffrey, and Benjamin Torbert
2004 “Bahamian English: Morphology and Syntax”. In Bernd Kortmann, Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie, Edgar Schneider, and Clive Upton, eds. A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 391–406.Google Scholar
Rickford, John R., and Russell J. Rickford
2000 Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David, Sali A. Tagliamonte, and Eric Smith
2005 “Goldvarb X: A Variable Rule Application for Macintosh and Windows”. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto [URL] (accessed Aug 16, 2014).
Schneider, Edgar W.
1989 American Earlier Black English: Morphological and Syntactic Variables. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
1997 “The Cline of Creoleness in Negation Patterns of Caribbean English Creoles”. In Raymond Hickey, and Stanislaw Puppel, eds. Language History and Linguistic Modelling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60 Birthday. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1055–1067.Google Scholar
1999 “Negation Patterns and the Cline of Creoleness in English-Oriented Varieties of the Caribbean”. In Pauline Christie, Barbara Lalla, Velma Pollard, and Lawrence Carrington, eds. Studies in Caribbean Language II: Papers from the 9th Biennial Conference of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics 1992 St. Augustine: Society for Caribbean Linguistics, 204–227.Google Scholar
Scott, Mike
2014 “WordSmith Tools Version 6”. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software [URL] (accessed Jul 28, 2014).
Sea Island Translation Team
2005 De Nyew Testament. The New Testament in Gullah Sea Island Creole with Marginal Text of the King James Version. New York: American Bible Society [URL] (accessed February 8, 2017).
Sells, Peter, John Rickford, and Thomas Wasow
1996 “An Optimality Theoretic Approach to Variation in Negative Inversion in AAVE”. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 141: 591–627. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seymour, Kendra C. N.
2009 “Dis How it Does Go: The Organisation of Imperfective Aspect in Urban Bahamian Creole English”. Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University.Google Scholar
Sharma, Devyani, and John R. Rickford
2009 “AAVE/Creole Copula Absence: A Critique of the Imperfect Learning Hypothesis”. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 241: 53–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shilling, Alison W.
1978 “Some Non-Standard Features of Bahamian Dialect Syntax”. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Hawaii.Google Scholar
Singler, John V.
2012a “Liberian Settler English”. In Bernd Kortmann, and Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 358–368.Google Scholar
2012b “Vernacular Liberian English”. In Bernd Kortmann, and Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 369–381.Google Scholar
Smith, Carlota S.
1997 The Parameter of Aspect (2nd ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A.
2006 Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Troike, Rudolph C.
2012 “Preverbal No-Negation in Gullah”. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 271: 235–254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walker, James A.
2000 “Rephrasing the Copula: Contraction and Zero in Early African American English”. In Shana Poplack, ed. The English History of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell, 35–72.Google Scholar
2005 “The Ain’t Constraint: Not-Contraction in Early African American English”. Language Variation and Change 171: 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walker, James A., and Jack Sidnell
2011 “Inherent Variability and Coexistent Systems: Negation on Bequia”. In Lars Hinrichs, and Joseph T. Farquharson, eds. Variation in the Caribbean. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 39–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weldon, Tracey L.
1994 “Variability in Negation in African American Vernacular English”. Language Variation and Change 61: 359–397. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 “Revisiting the Creolist Hypothesis: Copula Variability in Gullah and Southern Rural AAVE”. American Speech 781: 171–191. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 “Gullah Negation: A Variable Analysis”. American Speech 821: 341–366. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wickham, Hadley
2009 ggplot2. Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Winford, Donald
1983 “A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Negation in Trinidadian English”. In Lawrence D. Carrington, ed. Studies in Caribbean Language. St. Augustine: Society for Caribbean Linguistics, 203–210.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Laliberté, Catherine, Melanie Keller & Diana Wengler
2023. “So, I trucked out to the border, learned to say ain’t, came to find work”: the sociolinguistics of Firefly . Linguistics Vanguard 9:s3 ► pp. 275 ff. DOI logo
Laube, Alexander
2023. Variation in the imperfective in Bahamian English. World Englishes 42:1 ► pp. 27 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2023. Urban Panamanian English [Varieties of English Around the World, G70], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.