Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 12, Issue 2, 1997

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I present a formal representation of the process of relexification hypothesized to play a role in the formation of creole languages. Second, I show how this process operates on the basis of a subset of Haitian data.

This paper seeks to provide a unified analysis of the particle se in Haitian Creole, traditionally identified as an equality marker, a resumptive pronoun, or a focus marker. This study also serves to illustrate the role and the structural organization of functional projections in this non-inflected language. Under the proposed analysis, se (as well as ye, which has long been recognized as bearing a relation to se) is not a verbal copula; rather, it is a predicate forming aspectual head. A unified analysis based on general principles of UG is offered for se, appearing in predicative sentences, in nominal clefts, and in predicate cleft constructions. It is argued that in all these contexts, se always occurs with DP predicates or predicates headed by a functional head, such as CP predicates, not with any other type of predicates.

This paper revisits the long-standing controversy over whether so-called predicate adjectives like bigi 'big', bradi 'wide', etc. in Sranan (and other creoles) are truly adjectives or a subclass of verb. Using a variety of diagnostics, it concludes that such items are in fact verbal in their predicative function. Moreover, it argues that such items are best referred to as "property items" which display flexible categoriality, behaving like intransitive as well as transitive verbs, and also as adjectives which can either modify nouns or head adjectival phrases of degree. So-called predicate adjective structures in Sranan fall into two categories — those where property items function as intransitive verbs, and those involving predicate phrases in which the copula de precedes either adjectival phrases of degree or true adjectives, including those derived via reduplication from property items and others imported from Dutch. These conclusions apply more specifically to the variety of Sranan spoken as a native language by the majority of the African-descended population of Suriname. Another dialect of Sranan, associated primarily with non-native speakers, appears to treat property items in their predicative function as adjectives rather than verbs.