Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 11, Issue 1, 1996

There is a need for a label which will adequately describe the communicative competence acquired by speakers who learn to mix their codes in speech communities like those of Trinidad and Tobago. They mix according to community-based parameters for use of the codes in contact and according to their relative exposure to different admixtures of those codes. In a situation of leaking diglossia, the stylistic and social dimensions of code-mixing are blurred by shifts in the values set by these parameters, but code-mixing continues to be stylistically motivated, and varilingualism is posited as a useful term for the competence underlying it. It is in some ways comparable with the competence of bilinguals and multilinguals who mix their codes regularly in interaction with each other, but there are some differences in the relationship between the contact codes and the socio-linguistic milieux in which they are used, which affect, in particular, the structural constraints on language use. It lies, in effect, between mono-lingualism and bi/multilingualism. Varilingualism is shown to cover three main types of competence and to apply prototypically to situations in which the contact codes share a major part of their lexicons and converge in grammar.

This paper presents a diachronic analysis of Saramaccan syllable structure. It examines data from Schumann's 1778 manuscript, and demonstrates that early Saramaccan syllable structure included complex onsets. A case is also made that in the last two centuries, these complex onsets in Saramaccan have been simplified from CCV to CVCV. This example of language change has important implications for creole studies because most views of change (for two exceptions, see Muhlhäusler, 1986; Mufwene, 1993), especially those that rely on models of decreolization, often suggest that CV templates precede a change to complex onsets. A change from CCV to CVCV, though representing a common and less marked shift in terms of general syllable typology, appears to be considerably less documented among the Atlantic creole languages.

This paper attempts to determine whether the particle ja in Kristang (spoken in Malacca, Malaysia) functions as part of an aspect, a tense, or an aktionsart system. The paper first argues that ja does not mark the perfective in an aspectual system. Second, it argues that ja does not mark the past in a tense system. It then argues, instead, that ja marks an aktionsart category, namely, a change of state. The paper concludes by noting some historical changes in the usage of ja and speculates about some incipient changes in the Kristang system as a whole.The analysis of this particle in different conversational settings suggests that for some speakers ja marks the present relevance of events that occurred in the past. This usage of the particle relates to its original adverbial semantics in Portuguese, where já means 'already'. However, it is argued that this change in the usage of the particle has been induced by English. English is now the dominant language for many Kristang speakers and it has a semantically very similar present perfect. It is on the basis of these similarities that ja is determined to be largely a perfect marker for some Kristang speakers.