Main description:
This volume presents a careful selection of fifteen articles presented at the SPCL meetings in Atlanta, Boston and Hawai'i in 2003 and 2004. The contributions reflect - from various perspectives and using different types of data - on the interplay between structure and variation in contact languages, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributors consider a wide range of languages, including Surinamese creoles, Chinook Jargon, Yiddish, AAVE, Haitian Creole, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese varieties, Nigerian Pidgin, Sri Lankan Malay, Papiamentu, and Bahamian Creole English. A need to question and test existing claims regarding pidginization/creolization is evident in all contributions, and the authors provide analyses for a variety of grammatical structures: VO-ordering and affixation, agglutination, negation, TMAs, plural marking, the copula, and serial verb constructions. The volume provides ample evidence for the observation that pidgin/creole studies is today a mature subfield of linguistics which is making important contributions to general linguistic theory.
Table of contents:
- Introduction
- Part I: Structure
- The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan
- Tracing the origin of modality in the creoles of Suriname
- Modelling Creole Genesis
- The restructuring of tense/aspect systems in creole formation
- Syntactic properties of negation in Chinook Jargon, with a comparison of two source languages
- Sri Lankan Malay morphosyntax
- Sri Lanka Malay
- The advantages of a blockage-based etymological dictionary for proven or putative relexified languages
- Part II: Variation
- A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE
- Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English
- Aspects of variation in educated Nigerian Pidgin
- A linguistic time-capsule
- The progressive in the spoken Papiamentu of Aruba
- Was Haitian ever more like French?
- The late transfer of serial verb constructions as stylistic variants in Saramaccan creole
- Index
This volume presents a careful selection of fifteen articles presented at the SPCL meetings in Atlanta, Boston and Hawai'i in 2003 and 2004. The contributions reflect - from various perspectives and using different types of data - on the interplay between structure and variation in contact languages, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributors consider a wide range of languages, including Surinamese creoles, Chinook Jargon, Yiddish, AAVE, Haitian Creole, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese varieties, Nigerian Pidgin, Sri Lankan Malay, Papiamentu, and Bahamian Creole English. A need to question and test existing claims regarding pidginization/creolization is evident in all contributions, and the authors provide analyses for a variety of grammatical structures: VO-ordering and affixation, agglutination, negation, TMAs, plural marking, the copula, and serial verb constructions. The volume provides ample evidence for the observation that pidgin/creole studies is today a mature subfield of linguistics which is making important contributions to general linguistic theory.
Table of contents:
- Introduction
- Part I: Structure
- The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan
- Tracing the origin of modality in the creoles of Suriname
- Modelling Creole Genesis
- The restructuring of tense/aspect systems in creole formation
- Syntactic properties of negation in Chinook Jargon, with a comparison of two source languages
- Sri Lankan Malay morphosyntax
- Sri Lanka Malay
- The advantages of a blockage-based etymological dictionary for proven or putative relexified languages
- Part II: Variation
- A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE
- Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English
- Aspects of variation in educated Nigerian Pidgin
- A linguistic time-capsule
- The progressive in the spoken Papiamentu of Aruba
- Was Haitian ever more like French?
- The late transfer of serial verb constructions as stylistic variants in Saramaccan creole
- Index