Variation in ‘Being Done’

Forms of be done (I’m done writing; I’m done my homework; I’m done) appear relatively recently in the history of English, and show syntactic variation in different English dialects. This talk examines the grammatical structure of be done variants, and its implications for the relation between syntax, morphology, and semantic interpretation in derived statives. The analysis connects be done to the history of the be-perfect and auxiliary selection in English (McFadden and Alexiadou 2010).