Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 6, Issue 1, 1991

It is well known that since neither the inflectional morphemes nor most of the closed-class items of the lexifier language survive in pidgins, grammatical distinctions are not obligatorily marked. We thus find a large number of unmodified nouns and verbs. As pidgins are elaborated, processes of grammaticalization work to regularize the marking of grammatical categories and relations, and to increase redundancy overall. This paper considers the grammaticalization of determiners in Tok Pisin, looking at the extent to which the semantic features of specificity and definiteness are sufficient to explain the distributions we find in texts both from contemporary fluent second-language and creole speakers, and from earlier stages of the language. We suggest that the semantic feature of inalienability, marked in the grammars of many substrate languages, also plays an important role in determining Tok Pisin noun phrases.

Two recent works by Carden & Stewart (1988) and Arends (1989) have tried to prove a gradual rather than a single-generational origin for Haitian and Sranan respectively. Both arguments, however, are severely flawed. The Carden-Stewart argument from Haitian reflexivization is shown to depend on misinterpretations of both bioprogram theory and generative principles. Further, their claim that early Haitian was not a full language would entail that Middle English (among others) was also not a full language. Arends' claims of radical diachronic change in Sranan involve treating as an early creole sample a fragmentary text which, given the social and historical context of seventeenth-century Suriname, was most probably produced by a second-language learner of the creole. Reanalysis of Arends' data shows that he exaggerates the significance of marginal forms and mistakenly treats the inherent variability characteristic of all languages as evidence for ongoing change. In fact, none of the data reviewed in these works is inconsistent with the emergence of Haitian and Sranan as full languages in a single generation.

The paper presents a systematic description of rete and posib, including some patterns which have not been discussed before in the literature. The account confirms that these predicates do not provide examples of subject-to-subject raising constructions. A lexical subject with rete or posib is always assigned a theta-role by that predicate. The analysis provides a unified lexical representation of each predicate without resort to double lexical entries to represent different syntactic patterns which are phonolog-ically and semantically identical. The syntactic properties of these predicates are essentially parallel, with the basic exception of the distinction that rete is a Case assigner, but posib is not. Additionally, it is argued that rete requires an overt specification of the location or time of the event which it describes, but posib has no such requirement.

Louisiana French Creole (LFC) has clearly been undergoing decreoli-zation in the twentieth century; its exact nature is difficult to determine, since the only evidence from the previous century available up to now has come from literary texts of that time. Language data was elicited from elderly informants whose parents were the last monolingual creole speakers living in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama. Since communication between the speakers of New Orleans Creole and Mobile Creole was quite commonplace, Mon Louis Island Creole (MLIC) represents new evidence relating to nineteenth century LFC.This study presents an analysis of the MLIC and LFC noun phrase and verb phrase. Mon Louis Island (MLI) speakers use two-stem verbs which are not attested in nineteenth century LFC texts. On the other hand, there are developments in LFC, such as preposed definite articles, that were not documented in MLIC. Thus, the MLIC data might help distinguish the features already present in the nineteenth century from those which represent more recent changes in LFC.

Questionnaires were used to discover how twenty-eight students from Peru, Colombia, and Guatemala use the Spanish copulas ser and estar in foreigner talk. Ser usually was deleted but not estar when used as a locative or when discussing health. A multiple choice situational questionnaire was found to reflect actual use more accurately than one where respondents write what they think they would say. The pattern of deletion suggests that creolists should look at the role of "canned topics" in the development of the bipartite and tripartite copulas found in Pacific and Afro-Caribbean English Pidgins and Creoles.