Variation in African American English Verbal Morphology Following Ain’t in the Past and Present Perfect

This paper investigates variation in verbal morphology following negative auxiliary contractions, most notably ain’t, in past tense and present perfect constructions in Philadelphia African American English. Ain’t is of particular interest given its tense-aspect ambiguity, which may not overtly restrict following verbal forms in the same way as other auxiliaries. 774 instances of negative auxiliary contractions (hasn’t/haven’t, didn’t, and ain’t) were examined for whether they were followed by base (give), preterit (gave), or participle (given) verbal forms in a corpus of naturalistic speech from 42 speakers ranging in age (13-81) and social histories. Analysis of present perfect constructions (N=85) shows that ain’t is followed by the same verbal forms (preterit, participle) as hasn’t/haven’t except in rare cases (N=5 base forms) where priming by preceding forms of the same lexical verb may play a role. In the past tense (N=689), while the majority of verbs following ain’t are found in base form, identical to forms following didn’t, 25% of verbs are preterits. In these cases, speaker age is found to be the most influential conditioning factor. Overall results are examined in light of the structural relationship between negation and the expression of tense-aspect morphology in varieties of English.