An AAE Camouflage Constructions (Collins, Moody, Postal 2008)

Spears 1998 discusses a use of the word ass in African American English (AAE) in sentences like They done arrested her stupid ass and I’m gonna sue her ass. We refer to DPs like her stupid ass generically as the ACC (ass CAMOUFLAGE CONSTRUCTION), and we view the ACC as an instance of a universal grammatical phenomenon we call CAMOUFLAGE. The ACC is also attested in non-AAE dialects of American English (Beavers & Koontz-Garboden 2006a).

For certain syntactic properties, the possessor of the ACC behaves as if it were external to the larger DP (e.g. binding, control, selection); for others, it behaves as if it were internal to the larger DP (e.g. finite verb agreement, traditional constituent-structure tests). To account for this dual behavior, we propose that the ACC possessor DP originates in a position external to the ACC, and moves into its possessor position.

We  discuss  the  implications  of  our  analysis  for  other  areas  of  AAE  syntax,  including  the resumptive-with construction, a previously undocumented grammatical phenomenon, and the use of self in various constructions, which we suggest are illuminated by the notion camouflage. We briefly consider arguable instances of camouflage cross-linguistically in languages such as Georgian, French, the Mayan languages K’ekchi and Tzotzil, and Yoruba. Genuine similarities between the ACC and these other constructions support our perspective on the ACC.

An AAE Camouflage Construction

Collins, Chris, Simanique Moody and Paul Postal. 2008. An AAE Camouflage Construction. Language 84.1, 29-68.