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.

Haitian Creole is the creole language with the largest number of speakers: about ten million in Haiti and two million in diaspora communities in North American, France, and the Caribbean, including the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the French overseas departments. Haitian Creole presents a comprehensive view of the structure and development of Haitian Creole. It provides a detailed analysis of the phonology and grammar of the language and points out key differences between these two fundamental aspects of the language and corresponding features of French, its original target language. The book contains a detailed description of the productive strategies of vocabulary development and deals with the origin of Haitian Creole, as well as its relationship to the other French-based creoles in Louisiana, the Caribbean, French Guiana, and the Indian Ocean. A signal innovation with regard to other descriptions of the language is the treatment of linguistic variation, both in geographical dialects and variation as determined by social factors, as well as the presentation of earlier forms of Haitian Creole, as attested by texts from the Colonial period. Another major contribution is the discussion of language planning and related issues concerning the use of Haitian Creole in education and its status relative to French, the other officially recognized language of Haiti.

The Haitian Creole Language is the first book that deals broadly with a language that has too long lived in the shadow of French. With chapters contributed by the leading scholars in the study of Creole, it provides information on this language's history; structure; and use in education, literature, and social interaction. Although spoken by virtually all Haitians, Creole was recognized as the co-official language of Haiti only a little over twenty years ago. The Haitian Creole Language provides essential information for professionals, other service providers, and Creole speakers who are interested in furthering the use of Creole in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. Increased language competencies would greatly promote the education of Creole speakers and their participation in the social and political life of their countries of residence. This book is an indispensable tool for those seeking knowledge about the centrality of language in the affairs of Haiti, its people, and its diaspora.

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.

Roots of language was originally published in 1981 by Karoma Press (Ann Arbor). It was the first work to systematically develop a theory first suggested by Coelho in the late nineteenth century: that the creation of creole languages somehow reflected universal properties of language. The book also proposed that the same set of properties would be found to emerge in normal first-language acquisition and must have emerged in the original evolution of language. These proposals, some of which were elaborated in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1984), were immediately controversial and gave rise to a great deal of subsequent research in creoles, much of it aimed at rebutting the theory. The book also served to legitimize and stimulate research in language evolution, a topic regarded as off-limits by linguists for over a century. The present edition contains a foreword by the author bringing the theory up to date; a fuller exposition of many of its aspects can be found in the author's most recent work, More than nature needs (Harvard University Press, 2014).

The most authoritative guide ever published to the world's pidgin and creole languages. The 3-volume Survey describes their histories and linguistic characteristics. The Atlas of Pidgins and Creoles, published at the same time, shows how 130 linguistic features are distributed among the world's languages.

This volume brings together articles that are focused on segmental, syllabic and morphological aspects of creole words, thus contributing to the ongoing debates about the nature of phonology and morphology and their role in emergence and development of these languages. The papers cover a wide range of creole languages with different lexifier languages and address empirical, typological, historical and theoretical issues, drawing our attention to hitherto unknown phenomena or offering interesting new analyses of established facts. With contributions from: Parth Bhatt, Alain Kihm, Thomas Klein, Emmanuel Nikiema, Ingo Plag, Marina Pucciarelli, Jean-Louis Rougé, Eric Russel-Webb, Shobha Satyanath, Emmanuel Schang, Mareile Schramm, Norval Smith, Marleen van de Vate and Tonjes Veenstra.

This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.

Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, Second Edition presents the study of categories and the process of categorization as viewed through the lens of the founding disciplines of the cognitive sciences, and how the study of categorization has long been at the core of each of these disciplines. The literature on categorization reveals there is a plethora of definitions, theories, models and methods to apprehend this central object of study. The contributions in this handbook reflect this diversity. For example, the notion of category is not uniform across these contributions, and there are multiple definitions of the notion of concept. Furthermore, the study of category and categorization is approached differently within each discipline. For some authors, the categories themselves constitute the object of study, whereas for others, it is the process of categorization, and for others still, it is the technical manipulation of large chunks of information. Finally, yet another contrast has to do with the biological versus artificial nature of agents or categorizers. - Defines notions of category and categorization - Discusses the nature of categories: discrete, vague, or other - Explores the modality effects on categories - Bridges the category divide - calling attention to the bridges that have already been built, and avenues for further cross-fertilization between disciplines