| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1102994 | Language Sciences | 2015 | 18 Pages |
•The paper analyzes the discourse -ass construction in African American English.•The word ass in the construction (e.g., that ugly-ass junk) is not a nominal.•The word ass is a functional head that categorizes its sister as adjectival.•The construction is an expressive (Potts, 2007a and Potts, 2007b), as first observed by Spears (1998).
This paper presents an overview of the syntax, semantics, and prosody of the discourse -ass construction in African American English, as in get all that ugly-ass junk out of here. This construction involves attributive modification in which a noun or adjective (called the associate) forms a constituent with the word ass and modifies a head noun. The paper describes the syntactic distribution of both the associate and the word ass. Arguments are presented that support an analysis in which -ass is not a nominal but a functional head that categorizes its sister as adjectival, similar to -ish and -y in mainstream English. Semantically, it is argued that discourse -ass is an expressive in the sense of Potts (2007b): it is “semantically bleached” (Spears, 1998), and its semantic contribution is not truth conditional. The paper shows how discourse -ass has the properties associated with expressives as articulated by Potts (2007b) and as first observed about the construction in Spears (1998).
