Range in the Use and Realization of BIN in African American English.

This paper jointly considers syntactic, semantic, and phonological/phonetic factors in approaching an understanding of , a remote past marker in African American English that has been described as "stressed." It brings together data from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) and a production study in a small African American English-speaking community in southwest Louisiana to investigate the use and phonetic realization of constructions. Only 20 instances of constructions were found in CORAAL. This sparsity was not simply due to a dearth of semantic contexts for in the interviews, since 122 instances of semantically equivalent  + temporal adverbial variants were also found. These results raise questions about the extent to which constructions and  + temporal adverbial variants are used in different pragmatic and discourse contexts as well as in different speech styles. The production study elicited and past participle constructions in controlled syntactic and semantic environments. The phonetic realization of was found to be distributed over the entire utterance rather than localized to utterances were distinguished from past participle utterances by having higher ratios of fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration in / relative to preceding and following material in the utterance. In both studies, utterances were generally realized with a high F0 peak on and a reduced F0 range in the post- region, with variability in the presence and kinds of F0 movements utterance-initially and utterance-finally, as well as in F0 downtrends in the post- region.