Edited by K. Aaron Smith and Dawn Nordquist
[Studies in Language Companion Series 192] 2018
► pp. 155–173
This paper is a comparative and historical study of the grammatical status of auxiliary ain‘t in African-American English (AAE). Drawing on the representation of AAE speakers in works of fiction from the 19th century and present-day, the paper confirms that the broad range of uses of auxiliary ain‘t are nearly all available in historical AAE. The study also presents data that certain of the uses (specifically those not documented or only infrequently documented for non-AAE varieties) have increased in fictive representations of AAE. The analysis shows that the increase is led by a specific verb type (and even a specific verb) and thus suggests an exemplar-based increase and extension of ain‘t. Moreover, the paper also shows a formal morphosyntactic convergence of several uses of auxiliary ain‘t and motivates that convergence through exemplar merging, suggesting an association of that merged morphosyntactic form with sociolinguistic identity.