Grammatical Relations in a Radical Creole
Grammatical Relations in a Radical Creole

Author: Francis Byrne

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1987-01-01

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 9027279012

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With English and Portuguese as parent languages; the significant lexical retention of African languages; and the relative isolation of its speakers, Saramaccan has always stood out among Creole languages. Yet despite its obvious interest Saramaccan received little in the way of scholarly study. This groundbraking monograph dispels the mystery surrounding Saramaccan and provides strong evidence for a new approach to Creole origins. The study is carried out within the government-binding framework. The author shows how Saramaccan comes close to demonstrating what constitues the irreducible minimum of building blocks with which a language can be constructed, and the types of structure which must develop under such conditions. In this work Frank Byrne combines the outcome of patient and persevering fieldwork with a firm grasp of current theoretical issues and provides us with the insights into the nature of universal grammar of which a Creole like Saramaccan is potentially capable.

Grammatical Relations
Grammatical Relations

Author: Talmy Givón

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 9027229317

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This volume presents a functional perspective on grammatical relations (GRs) without neglecting their structural correlates. Ever since the 1970s, the discussion of RGs by functionally-oriented linguists has focused primarily on their functional aspects, such as reference, cognitive accessibility and discourse topicality. With some exceptions, functionalists have thus ceded the discussion of the structural correlates of GRs to various formal schools. Ever since Edward Keenan's pioneering work on subject properties (1975, 1976), it has been apparent that subjecthood and objecthood can only be described properly by a basket of neither necessary nor sufficient properties — thus within a framework akin to Rosch's theory of Prototype. Some GR properties are functional (reference, topicality, accessibility); others involve overt coding (word-order, case marking, verb agreement). Others yet are more abstract, involving control of grammatical processes (rule-governed behavior). Building on Keenan's pioneering work, this volume concentrates on the structural aspects of GRs within a functionalist framework. Following a theoretical introduction, the papers in the volume deal primarily with recalcitrant typological issues: The dissociation between overt coding properties of GRs and their behavior-and-control properties; GRs in serial verb constructions; GRs in ergative languages; The impact of clause union and grammaticalization on GRs.

Predication in Caribbean English Creoles
Predication in Caribbean English Creoles

Author: Donald Winford

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1993-01-21

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 9027276951

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This is the first major study of the conservative or basilectal English creoles of the Anglophone Caribbean since Bailey's (1966) and Bickerton's (1975) descriptions of Jamaican and Guyanese Creole respectively. The book offers a comprehensive, unified treatment of the core areas of CEC predication, including the verb complex, auxiliary ordering, voice and valency, copular and attributive predication, serial verb constructions and complementation. Particularly note-worthy is its utilization of an extremely rich data base and a variety of sources to provide an up-to-date, state of the art account of predicate structures in CEC. The book presents new analyses of several areas of CEC syntax, including such phenonema as passivization, serialization and complementation, which have not been thoroughly analyzed, if at all, in the previous literature. The areas covered in the book involve a wide range of grammatical phenomena centering around the various sub-classes of verb and their subcategorization. The book consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and six chapters, each of which explores some aspect of the behavior of verbs (or verb-like predicators) and the constructions in which they occur. The book is intended to be a pre-theoretical account of the facts of CEC predication. However, to further elucidate the workings of the grammar and add some degree of explicitness to the description, the author also presents more formal analyses of the grammatical phenomena, employing the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG).

Structure and Variation in Language Contact
Structure and Variation in Language Contact

Author: Ana Deumert

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2006-11-30

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9027293082

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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.

Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages
Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages

Author: Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2001-02-12

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9027275459

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Basic notions in the field of creole studies, including the category of “creole languages” itself, have been questioned in recent years: Can creoles be defined on structural or on purely sociohistorical grounds? Can creolization be understood as a graded process, possibly resulting in different degrees of “radicalness” and intermediate language types (“semi-creoles”)? If so, by which linguistic structures are these characterized, and by which extralinguistic conditions have they been brought about? Which are the linguistic mechanisms underlying processes of restructuring, and how did grammaticalization and reanalysis shape the reorganization of linguistic, specifically morphosyntactic structures commonly called “creolization”? What is the role of language contact, language mixing, substrates and superstrates, or demographic factors in these processes? This volume provides select and revised papers from a 1998 colloquium at the University of Regensburg in which these questions were addressed. 19 contributions by renowned scholars discuss structural, sociohistorical and theoretical aspects, building upon case studies of both Romance-based and English-oriented creoles. This book marks a major step forward in our understanding of the nature of creolization.

Caribbean Language Issues, Old & New
Caribbean Language Issues, Old & New

Author: Pauline Christie

Publisher: University of the West Indies Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9789766400156

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CaribbeanLanguage Issues Old and New was conceived as a tribute to ProfessorMervyn Alleyne-who is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in thefield of Caribbean language-on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. A wide variety of issues are dealt with: phonology, syntax, discourse, creole genesis, language problems in education, among others. Some authors re-visit topics on which Alleyne himself has written, building his insights in many cases, while others explore areas which had not been investigated previously. This work provides access to recent research by Caribbean scholars, and goes some way towards filling a gap, particularly in its usefulness to students of linguistics and teachers of English. At the same time, the uninitiated reader who decides to explore its pages will not be unrewarded, since the the style is simple and direct and the content, for the most part, not highly technical.

Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties
Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties

Author: Salikoko S. Mufwene

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 9780820314655

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For review see: Daniel J. Crowley, in New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 70, no. 1 & 2 (1996); p. 188-190.

Creoles, Their Substrates, and Language Typology
Creoles, Their Substrates, and Language Typology

Author: Claire Lefebvre

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 641

ISBN-13: 9027206767

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Since creole languages draw their properties from both their substrate and superstrate sources, the typological classification of creoles has long been a major issue for creolists, typologists, and linguists in general. Several contradictory proposals have been put forward in the literature. For example, creole languages typologically pair with their superstrate languages (Chaudenson 2003), with their substrate languages (Lefebvre 1998), or even, creole languages are alike (Bickerton 1984) such that they constitute a definable typological class (McWhorter 1998). This book contains 25 chapters bearing on detailed comparisons of some 30 creoles and their substrate languages. As the substrate languages of these creoles are typologically different, the detailed investigation of substrate features in the creoles leads to a particular answer to the question of how creoles should be classified typologically. The bulk of the data show that creoles reproduce the typological features of their substrate languages. This argues that creoles cannot be claimed to constitute a definable typological class."