Abstract :
This article introduces BLUR, an electronic corpus of Blues lyrics from the early twentieth century, as a valuable resource for the study of syntactic phenomena in Earlier African American English and investigates the properties and origins of a peculiar construction found in it. The design of the BLUR corpus is presented, and methodological consequences resulting from the nature of the texts are discussed. Subsequently, a few noteworthy syntactic structures documented in it are briefly illustrated. The most challenging of these, a sequence of inchoative verbs (notably begin, start, or commence), the particle to, and a verbal –ing form, as in begin to falling, is then analyzed in some detail, considering syntactic constraints and historical documentation in potentially related varieties, represented by electronic corpora and other sources from Late Middle English to present-day dialects. Based on these findings, a hypothesis on the likely origins and diffusion of this construction is developed.
