Expressive meaning in an AAE attributive construction

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). •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, 2007b), as first observed by Spears (1998).