Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 26, Issue 2, 2011

Previous sociolinguistic research concerning the use of Hawai‘i Creole (HC) in public discourse has posited a link between a negative public image and subsequent discouragement of its use by government and media (e.g. Romaine 1999; Sato 1989, 1991, 1994), except in some limited venues. This paper reports on the emerging trend of HC use in media discourse, presenting data from local television advertisements and discussing the role of language therein. Despite the fact that HC has traditionally been a stigmatized variety in public discourse, its employment in television advertisements is currently on the rise, riding a wave of positive sentiment for Hawai‘i’s local culture. The use of HC in the commercials is strategic and carefully controlled; while heavy Pidgin (basilectal HC) is still avoided as possibly detrimental to brand image, the right touch of HC is a favored tactic among these advertisement producers. HC is one of a number of criteria for implicit membership for the Hawai‘i residents on which advertisers may draw in an attempt to fabricate a synthetic membership with the audience.

A restructured variety of Spanish spoken by small communities of Afro-descendents in Bolivia differs from modern Spanish in exhibiting no noun-adjective agreement for gender or number. Only a few individuals continue to speak this most basilectal variety; the majority of speakers exhibit at least some gender and number concord, in a fashion that proceeds generally rightward, from determiners and other prenominal modifiers to head nouns, postnominal modifiers, and predicate nominatives/adjectives. Number concord (plural marking) usually appears before gender concord in mesolectal varieties, and occurs at a higher rate than gender concord across the entire range of Afro-Bolivian speakers. A variationist analysis based on a corpus of recorded material suggests that this gradual emergence of (feminine) gender and plural marking represents a systematic form of decreolization governed largely by structural principles, namely the stepwise activation of agreement projections. Decreolization is represented as a series of nested intermediate grammars, each of which properly contains the preceding one(s).

This paper argues that creolistics has tended to overemphasize the formal and general properties of Creole languages to the neglect of their substantive and singular lexical properties. Rather than assuming that Creoles can express anything their speakers need or want to say as soon as they come into being, this paper shows, with data from a range of Creoles, that lexical adaptation to new natural environments is a prolonged gradual process. The perspective taken is ecolinguistic, i.e. it regards language as a management tool enabling its users to sustain functional links between themselves and their environment. Ecolinguistics judges the adequacy of the lexicon in terms of its ability to do this.

In this paper I argue that there is no true number morphology in Jamaican Creole (JC). Instead, I show that dem, traditionally taken to be a plural marker, is more properly analyzed as a marker of inclusiveness, a defining characteristic of definiteness. These are expected outcomes of JC being in the class of languages which are claimed to have set nouns, i.e. nouns which, when combined with a numeral X, refer to an X-numbered set of individuals rather than to X number of individuals (Rijkhoff 2004). Since JC does not mark plurality in the same way as its lexifier English, individuation and number in JC cannot be analysed in the same way as is done for English. The proposal for a syntactic analysis of number in JC, given the above, is that functional structure above the NP provides for optional individuation via Cl(assifier)Phrase, and additionally for optional number specification, via Num(ber)Phrase.