Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2014

In the Surinamese creole language Sranan, verbs in finite clauses that lack overt TMA-marking are often considered to be ambiguous between past and present interpretations (depending on the lexical aspect of the verb involved) or analyzed as having a perfective value. We claim that these verbs are in fact zero-marked, and we investigate the various uses of this zero expression in relation to context and lexical aspect on the basis of corpus data and native speaker elicitations. It is shown that existing analyses do not cover and unify all the various uses of the construction. We propose, as an alternative, to regard the zero form as present perfective marker, whereby tense and aspect are conceived of as fundamentally epistemic categories, in line with Langacker (1991). This combination of present tense and perfective aspect, which is regarded as infelicitous in typological studies of tense and aspect (cf. the ‘present perfective paradox’, Malchukov 2009), gives rise to the various interpretations associated with zero. However, in all of its uses, zero still indicates that, at the most basic level, a situation belongs to the speaker’s conception of ‘immediate reality’ (her domain of ‘inclusion’). This basic ‘presentness’ distinguishes zero from the past-tense marker ben, which implies dissociation.

Creoles (here including expanded pidgins) are commonly viewed as being more analytic than their lexifiers and other languages in terms of grammatical marking. The purpose of the study reported in this article was to examine the validity of this view by measuring the frequency of analytic (and synthetic) markers in corpora of two different English-lexified creoles — Tok Pisin and Hawai‘i Creole — and comparing the quantitative results with those for other language varieties. To measure token frequency, 1,000 randomly selected words in each creole corpus were tagged with regard to word class, and categorized as being analytic, synthetic, both analytic and synthetic, or purely lexical. On this basis, an Analyticity Index and a Syntheticity Index were calculated. These were first compared to indices for other languages and then to L1 varieties of English (e.g. standard British and American English and British dialects) and L2 varieties (e.g. Singapore English and Hong Kong English). Type frequency was determined by the size of the inventories of analytic and synthetic markers used in the corpora, and similar comparisons were made.The results show that in terms of both token and type frequency of grammatical markers, the creoles are not more analytic than the other varieties. However, they are significantly less synthetic, resulting in much higher ratios of analytic to synthetic marking. An explanation for this finding relates to the particular strategy for grammatical expansion used by individuals when the creoles were developing.

Chota Valley Spanish (CVS) is an Afro-Hispanic dialect spoken in the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi, Ecuador. The structure of CVS is relatively similar to Spanish, even though the conditions that characterized colonial Chota Valley seem — at a first glance — to have been ideal for a creole language to develop: a low white/black ratio, harsh working conditions on sugarcane plantations, massive introduction of African-born workers, and minimal contact with the outside Spanish speaking world (Schwegler 1999: 240; McWhorter 2000: 10–11). Two main hypotheses have been proposed to account for this fact: (a) the Monogenesis Hypothesis (Schwegler 1999); (b) the Afrogenesis Hypothesis (McWhorter 2000).In the present paper, the linguistic and sociohistorical evidence available for CVS is analyzed. Findings indicate that the long assumed creolizing conditions for CVS were not in place in colonial Chota Valley and therefore hypotheses (a) and (b) do not accurately explain the true nature and evolution of this language. The present study suggests that CVS can be better analyzed as the result of intermediate and advanced second language acquisition processes, which do not imply a previous creole stage.