In doing research for a paper, I came across this TREMENDOUS paper, African American Communicative Practices : Improvisation, Semantic License, and Augmentation by Arthur K. Spears. This is exactly my typea thing right here. I’m not gonna jack the whole thing, but this part is just too good to keep to myself. It’s a formalized version of something I kicked around before.
Ass compounds have a semantically bleached ass in them. The ass in these expressions does not refer to the anatomy; its meaning is grammatical rather than lexical. It is a discourse marker, an expressive element explicitly marking a discourse as direct or heightening the poetic and performance character of what is said or both. Unlike pseudo reflexives and pseudo pronouns, ass compounds 1) allow only the word ass, 2) may have inanimate referents, and 3) must be followed by a noun (including selfselves). The following examples illustrate these points:
9. Get all that ugly-ass junk out of here.
Cf. Get all that ugly junk out of here.10. a * Get all that ugly-butt junk out of here
b *Get all that ugly asshole junk out ofhere
c *Get all that ugly-behind junk out of here
d. *Get all that ugly-eyed junk out of hereCompound ass is semantically abstract and no longer references the body in any literal way. Indeed, that is one reason why it can be used in referring to inanimate objects. It can also be used in cases where the morpheme(s) with which it is compounded cannot refer to buttocks, e.g.,
11. Look at that smart-ass nigga.
Smart is an adjective that cannot refer to buttocks. However, in the case of adjectives that could refer to anatomical ass, there can be ambiguity:
12. Look at that fat ass idiot.
In the example above, I have not inserted a hyphen, which would indicate the use of compound ass. If compound ass were employed, the sentence could indicate that the individual in question is fat, while expressing nothing concerning his or her posterior specifically. Alternatively, the sentence could also refer to the individual’s buttocks (with anatomical ass). The ambiguity, of cours, stems from the fact that fat can describe the whole body or the body part alone.
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Ass compounds must be followed by a noun, as illustrated alone.
20. a. *John is trifling-ass.
b. *John is bitch-ass.
c. *John is jive-ass.21. a. *John is a trifling-ass
b. *John is a bitch-ass
c. *John is a jive-assNot than an ass compound cannot be grammatical whether it is constructed as an adjective without any determiners (as in Example 20) or as a noun with a determiner (as in example 21). These examples have an actual adjective in the ass compound, but note that in the following examples, ass is compounded with the noun, bitch. Therefore, the syntactic category (part of speech) of the word in the compound does not affect its grammaticality in cases where no noun follows the compound. Ungrammaticality without a following a noun is quite independent of the parts of speech appearing in the compound.
22. a. John is a trifling-ass idiot
b. John is a bitch-ass idiot
c. John is a jive-ass idiot.
There’s more to it, but man! That’s good readin!
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