The prosody and meaning of BIN constructions in African American English
The pronunciation of Tense-Modality-Aspect markers "be", "BIN", and "dən" can differ from the pronunciation of the corresponding auxiliary/main verb forms, so, for example, resultant state marker "dən" is unstressed in African American English (e.g. He dən done his homework. ‘He has already done his homework’) although it is stressed in other varieties of English in which it occurs. Some informal observations have been made about the intonation of these markers; however, only prosodic properties of stressed "BIN", which indicates that an eventuality or part of it is in the distant past (1), have been addressed in the literature. This paper is a production study of "BIN" that contributes a first phonetic and phonological characterization of sentence-level intonation in "BIN" constructions across systematically varied semantic predicate types and explicates methodological challenges arising in studying fine-grained aspects of the semantics-prosody interface.
