Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 9, Issue 2, 1994

On the evidence of textual attestations from 1676-1835, early Barbadian English is shown to have exhibited many more nonstandard features than is generally recognized. Such features, which are commonly, if not exclusively, found in pidgins and creoles, include vowel epenthesis, paragoge and initial s-deletion processes, creole tense-modality-aspect marking, copula absence, the use of invariant no as a preverbal negative and as an emphatic positive marker, the occurrence of one as indefinite article, and a variety of morphologically unmarked pronominal forms.The texts consist of samples of African and Afro-Barbadian speech from historical sources, including ones which linguists have not previously considered. The textual samples are examined century by century, accompanied by a detailed account of the contemporary sociohistorical setting, and interpreted in terms of known and inferred Caribbean patterns of sociolinguistic variation, both in the present and in the past. It is concluded that while early Barbadian speech comprised a range of varieties, creolelike varieties were undoubtedly a part of that range.

Typically not the focus of linguistic analysis, the expressive function nonetheless represents a core linguistic behavior. Throughout Africa, ideo-phones robustly manifest that function. When adult speakers learn and begin to use a second language, particularly in contact situations with limited L2 input, they often draw on structures and resources from L1. These facts suggest that when languages with ideophones serve as the substrate for a contact language, ideophones will be found in that new language, as is the case for, e.g., Krioulo (Guinea Bissau), Krio (Sierra Leone), and Liberian English. Yet, not all African contact languages possess ideophones. This paper characterizes the distribution of ideophones in pidgins, Creoles, and other contact varieties.

Relative clauses in Tayo, the French-lexicon Creole of St-Louis (New Caledonia) which emerged in the late 19th century, reflect in their construction and their distribution typically Melanesian patterns, including a sub-ordinator derived from a personal pronoun, sa. Thematization similarly reflects Melanesian strategies, but may also be handled by clefting using a subordinator ki (< French qui). While this construction shows how the lexifier may be modifying Tayo, the emergence of a complex system of relativization and thematization, over three generations after the settlement of St-Louis in 1860, shows that French was not the "motor" of creolization, and suggests that creolization is, in effect, a special case of language shift and creation over some 50 or so years.