Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2009

This paper describes morphological and syntactic variation in a sample of forty conversations among highly educated Jamaicans taken from the Jamaican component of the International Corpus of English. The guiding question is whether the creole continuum model can account for the way speakers like these, who have a full command of acrolectal Jamaican English and tend to be proficient in Jamaican Creole as well, make use of the range of varieties available to them. Variation in the data is approached from two angles: first, selected variables are analysed quantitatively, and the results are compared to findings for more formal types of texts in the same corpus; second, inter- and intra-textual variation in the sample is described qualitatively. In broad quantitative terms, the data fall in between the ‘high acrolect’ and the upper mesolect but there are fine distinctions in the degree to which Creole features are used in different conversations or segments thereof. Building on Allsopp’s distinction between ‘informal’ and ‘anti-formal’ usage, the paper proposes that morphological and syntactic variation in educated Jamaican speech can be described in the framework of a stylistic continuum, whose relation to the sociolinguistic continuum seems to be a close but complex one.

This study confirms the robustness of the finding in the literature on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and creole English (especially in the Caribbean) that omission of copular and auxiliary be varies systematically according to predicate type. Verbal predicates are associated with the highest rates of copula absence and following NPs with the lowest rates; following adjectives or locatives show intermediate rates (see Rickford 1998:190). Although this pattern is highly consistent, convincing explanations for it remain elusive. A recurrent suggestion (McWhorter 2000; Winford 1998, 2004; Wolfram 2000) is that the AAVE and creole English pattern is inherited independently from general processes of imperfect second language learning (simplification, generalization) that operated as the African ancestors of today’s speakers acquired English. In this paper, we pursue this possibility, but discover that the grammatical conditioning of copula absence in AAVE and creole varieties is distinct from the patterns found in second language learning data. We examine four sets of data on English acquired as a second language (Indian English, South African Indian English, Singaporean English, Spanish English) and show, using two statistical measures, that conditioning of copula absence in the second language data does not resemble the AAVE and creole pattern. (One possible exception is the high rates of omitted be with verbal predicates, for which we explore possible explanations.) We show further that typological diversity in copula systems also militates against a universal markedness-based pattern. The findings reduce the possibility that the overall AAVE/creole pattern derives from a general tendency in second language acquisition and increase the possibility that the pattern reflects a shared substrate influence from West African languages or other historical contact factors.

Mixed languages are said to be the result of a process of intertwining (e.g. Bakker & Muysken 1995, Bakker 1997), a regular process in which the grammar of one language is combined with the lexicon of another. However, the outcome of this process differs from language pair to language pair. As far as morphosyntax is concerned, people have discussed these different outcomes and the reasons for them extensively, e.g. Bakker 1997 for Michif, Mous 2003 for Ma’a, Muysken 1997a for Media Lengua and 1997b for Callahuaya. The issue of phonology, however, has not generated a large debate. This paper compares the phonological systems of the mixed languages Media Lengua, Callahuaya, Mednyj Aleut, and Michif. It will be argued that the outcome of the process of intertwining, as far as phonology is concerned, is at least partly determined by the extent to which unmixed phonological domains exist.