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Habitual be is the use of an uninflected ''be'' in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Caribbean English to mark habitual or extended actions, in place of the Standard English inflected forms of ''be'', such as ''is'' and ''are''. In AAVE, use of ''be'' indicates that an entity repeatedly does an action or embodies a trait, whereas in Standard English, the use of ''be'' merely conveys that an individual has done an action in a particular tense, such as in the statement "She was singing." It is a common misconception that AAVE speakers simply replace ''is'' with ''be'' across all tenses with no added meaning. In fact, AAVE speakers use ''be'' to mark a habitual grammatical aspect not explicitly distinguished in Standard English. For example, to ''be singing'' means ''to sing habitually,'' not ''to presently be singing.'' In one experiment, children were shown drawings of Elmo eating cookies while Cookie Monster looked on. Both black and white subjects agreed that Elmo ''is'' eating cookies, but the black children said that Cookie Monster ''be'' eating cookies. == Hypothesized sources == The source of habitual ''be'' in AAVE is still disputed. Some linguists suggest it came from the finite ''be'' in the 17th to 19th century English of British settlers, while other linguists believe that it came from Scots-Irish immigrants whose Ulster Scots dialects mark habitual verb forms with ''be'' and ''do be''. One hypothesis is that habitual be simply diffused into New World Black English from Hibernian English (HE) through contact in the Caribbean. One piece of evidence for this hypothesis is that the two dialects structure sentences with the habitual ''be'' almost identically. For example: (1) 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Habitual be」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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