Is There Anything Inherently Ridiculous About These Tenses?

In the early 19 eighties, tony morrison referred to the five different present tenses of african american english. A linguist named john rickford at stanford and others have since codified many tenses,. And i'll quickly run through those five using rickford's nomenclature. The point being, there is a precise and consistent pattern at work here, if you know it. If you say something like she been married, it means she has been married for a while and still is. Yet, when he put that statement to 25 white people and 25 africans, 23 of the afAfrican Americans understood the woman to still be married,