A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar of English Creoles provides a detailed, comprehensive description of the morphology, grammar, and syntax of a selected number of English creoles, including those spoken on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific. This book: • Focuses on a number of traditional grammatical categories to provide a comprehensive description and discussion of these languages; • Identifies not only how creoles differ from their lexifier, but also how they differ from one another; • Provides effective comparative descriptions to enable an insightful understanding of language evolution. This book will be ideal supplementary reading for students and researchers of linguistics, and will particularly appeal to those with an interest in descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, World Englishes, contact and creole linguistics, and language policy and planning.

This study seeks to answer some fundamental questions in Creole studies: which structural features are shared by all the world's Creoles, and to what extent are the traits typical of Atlantic Creoles also found elsewhere in the world?

Pichi is an Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. It is an offshoot of 19th century Krio (Sierra Leone) and shares many characteristics with West African relatives like Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English, as well as with the English-lexifier creoles of the insular and continental Caribbean. This comprehensive description presents a detailed analysis of the grammar and phonology of Pichi. It also includes a collection of texts and wordlists. Pichi features a nominative-accusative alignment, SVO word order, adjective-noun order, prenominal determiners, and prepositions. The language has a seven-vowel system and twenty-two consonant phonemes. Pichi has a two-tone system with tonal minimal pairs, morphological tone, and tonal processes. The morphological structure is largely isolating. Pichi has a rich system of tense-aspect-mood marking, an indicative-subjunctive opposition, and a complex copular system with several suppletive forms. Many features align Pichi with the Atlantic-Congo languages spoken in the West African littoral zone. At the same time, characteristics like the prenominal position of adjectives and determiners show a typological overlap with its lexifier English, while extensive contact with Spanish has left an imprint on the lexicon and grammar as well.

French Creoles: A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar is the first complete reference to present the morphology, grammar and syntax of a representative selection of French Creoles in one volume. The book is organised to promote a thorough understanding of the grammar of French Creoles and presents its complexities in a concise and readable form. An extensive index, cross-referencing and a generous use of headings provides readers with immediate access to the information they require. The varieties included within the volume provide a representative collection of French Creoles from the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, including: Mauritian Creole, Seychelles Creole, Reunion Creole (where relevant), Haitian Creole, Martinique Creole, Guadeloupe Creole, Guyanese French Creole, Karipuna, St. Lucia Creole, Louisiana Creole and Tayo. By providing a comprehensive description of a range of French Creoles in a clear and non-technical manner, this grammar is the ideal reference for all linguists and researchers with an interest in Creole studies and in French, descriptive and historical linguistics.

While universally present in languages, negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages, however, negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language, generally exhibit negative concord, a construction popularly dubbed ‘double negation’, where several expressions, each negative on its own, come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction – problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerge from the meaning of their parts – has fostered much research, the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely taken into account. Aiming at bridging this gap, this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed, the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.

The Atlas presents commentaries and colour maps showing how 130 linguistic features - phonological, syntactic, morphological, and lexical - are distributed among the world's pidgins and creoles. Designed and written by the world's leading experts, it is a unique resource of outstanding value for linguists of all persuasions throughout the world.

Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed. The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume. Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more. The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles. Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.

This book collects a selection of fifteen papers presented at three meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in 1996 and 1997. The focus is on papers which approach issues in creole studies with novel perspectives, address understudied pidgin and creole varieties, or compellingly argue for controversial positions. The papers demonstrate how pidgins and creoles shed light on issues such as verb movement, contact-induced language change and its gradations, discourse management via tense-aspect particles, language genesis, substratal transfer, and Universal Grammar, and cover a wide range of contact languages, ranging from English- and French-based creoles through Portuguese creoles of Africa and Asia, Sango, Popular Brazilian Portuguese, West African Pidgin Englishes, and Hawaiian Creole English.

A clear and concise introduction to the study of how new languages come into being.

This book reflects an ongoing shift in the study of contact languages: After a period of history-free universalism, it directs the attention to the individual historical circumstances under which the pidgin and creole languages arose. The contributions deal with different areas of language structure including phonology, morphology, and syntax, providing a wealth of structural and sociohistorical data that any comprehensive theory of contact languages will have to account for. Each of the papers provides a thorough description of a structural phenomenon against the background of the sociohistorical contact situation. The languages covered in the book are: Guiné-Bissau Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawai‘i Creole, Indo-Portuguese creoles, Jamaican Creole, Lingua Franca, North American French, Mauritian Creole, Santomense, Saramaccan, Seychelles Creole, Sranan, Surinamese Maroon creoles, Vincentian Creole, and Zamboangueño Chavacano.