Donald Winford

Predication in Caribbean English Creoles

This is the first major study of the conservative or basilectal English creoles of the Anglophone Caribbean since Baileys (1966) and Bickertons (1975) descriptions of Jamaican and Guyanese Creole respectively. The book offers a comprehensive, unified treatment of the core areas of CEC predication, including the verb complex, auxiliary ordering, voice and valency, copular and attributive predication, serial verb constructions and complementation. Particularly note-worthy is its utilization of an extremely rich data base and a variety of sources to provide an up-to-date, state of the art account of predicate structures in CEC. The book presents new analyses of several areas of CEC syntax, including such phenonema as passivization, serialization and complementation, which have not been thoroughly analyzed, if at all, in the previous literature. The areas covered in the book involve a wide range of grammatical phenomena centering around the various sub-classes of verb and their subcategorization. The book consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and six chapters, each of which explores some aspect of the behavior of verbs (or verb-like predicators) and the constructions in which they occur. The book is intended to be a pre-theoretical account of the facts of CEC predication. However, to further elucidate the workings of the grammar and add some degree of explicitness to the description, the author also presents more formal analyses of the grammatical phenomena, employing the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG).

Back to the past: The BEV/creole connection revisited

This article compares the marking of past temporal reference in Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Trinidadian English (TE), with particular attention to the alternation of O and {ed}. The comparison reveals similarities in the patterns of variation according to verb type and phonological conditioning which suggest that past marking in contemporary BEV preserves traces of an earlier process of shift from a creole pattern to one approximating the Standard English pattern. Further examination of the TE data reveals that the use of {ed} is highly constrained in cases where habitual or characteristic past meaning is conveyed; in such cases, the use of O is near categorical. These findings may have implications for BEV which future research can clarify. The article also considers the case of stressed remote BIN in BEV and argues that it may have arisen as the result of reanalysis of an earlier creole anterior bin under the influence of unstressed (continuative perfect) bin , derived from English have + been . This provides further support for the view that, though early BEV may not have been a fully fledged creole, it arose through a process of restructuring in which a creole substrate played a significant role. Finally, the article notes that past marking is only one aspect of the overall organization of the BEV tense/mood/aspect system, which shares other features in common with creole varieties, including resultative done and combinatory possibilities among auxiliaries. Future research on these aspects of the BEV verb complex can shed more light on the BEV/creole connection.

Re-Examining Caribbean English Creole Continua.

This paper re-examines the history and contemporary structure of Caribbean English creole continua, with illustration from the varied sociolinguistic situations in Belize, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad. It argues for the view that continua existed in these situations from the earliest period of contact, and challenges the claim that they evolve solely via ‘decreolization’ of basilects under influence from acrolects. It also argues for a co-existent systems approach to the contemporary structure of these continua. The evidence of sociolinguistic studies supports the idea that they result from interaction between relatively stable grammars, conditioned by social and situational factors. The variation produced by this interaction provides insight into the kinds of shift and contact-induced change that have always operated in these situations.

The concept of "diglossia" in Caribbean creole situations

Fergusons concept of diglossia is examined with a view to dedetermining its applicability to creole continua. The characteristics of classic instances of diglossia are subdivided into sociocultural and linguistic features, and these in turn are used as a basis for determining the extent to which different types of community might be fruitfully described as diglossic. The conclusion is drawn that creole continua share far more in common with Fergusons defining cases of diglossia than they do not, and far more than other types of speech community. (Diglossia, Creole continua, Typology of speech communities)

Focus and grammatical relations in Creole languages

1. Acknowledgements 2. Contents 3. Introduction: Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages (by Byrne, Francis) 4. 1. Verb Focus, predicate Clefting and Predicate Doubling 5. Verb focus in the Typology of Kwa/Kru and Haitian (by Manfredi, Victor) 6. The Question of Predicate Clefting in the Indian Ocean Creoles (by Seuren, Pieter A.M.) 7. Two Types of predicate Doubling Adverbs in Haitian Creole (by Lefebvre, Claire) 8. 2. Focus and anti-focus 9. Scope of Negation and Focus in Gullah (by Mufwene, Salikoko S.) 10. Focus in Tok Pisin (by Sankoff, Gillian) 11. What is it that you said? A study of Obligatory Focalization in Two Creoles and Beyond (by Kihm, Alain) 12. Anti-Focus in Yor*bss: Some Implications for Creoles (by Oyelaran, Olasope O.) 13. 3. Focus and Pronominals 14. Subject Focus and Pronouns (by Bickerton, Derek) 15. Focus, Emphasis and Pronominals in Saramaccan (by Byrne, Francis) 16. 4. Discourse Patterning 17. Focus, Topic Particles and Discourse Markers in the Belizean Creole Continuum (by Escure, Genevieve) 18. Foregrounding and Backgrounding in Haitian Creole Discourse (by Spears, Arthur K.) 19. 5. Grammatical Relations 20. Expletives in Double-Object Constructions in Haitian Creole (by Lumsden, John S.) 21. Reflexives of Ibero-Romance Reflexive Clitic + Verb Combinations in Papiamentu: Thematic Grids and Grammatical Relations (by Muysken, Pieter) 22. Author Index 23. Language Index 24. Subject Index

The linguistic variable and syntactic variation in creole continua

One of the achievements of sociolinguistic research has been to show that fluctuation in language use which had traditionally been referred to as free variation was in fact not free at all, but correlated with a variety of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. The analytical device proposed by Labov (1966) as a means of investigating such conditioned variation is the linguistic variable, a linguistic unit consisting of two or more variants which co-vary with other linguistic as well as extra-linguistic variables. Labov conceived of the variants of a variable as socially and stylistically different alternative but linguistically equivalent ways of ‘saying the same thing’. Labov’s early work applied the concept of the variable to phonological data alone, but the concept was soon extended to the morphological and syntactic levels of linguistic structure. l

Variability in the use of perfect have in Trinidadian English: A problem of categorial and semantic mismatch

Sociolinguistic situations that involve interplay between standard and nonstandard varieties have posed certain difficulties for the analysis of variation at the morphosyntactic level (Harris, 1984; Milroy, 1987). In particular, there is the problem of defining the scope and relevant contexts of morphosyntactic variables—a problem closely linked to that of identifying the semantic equivalence in terms of which the variable is defined (Cheshire, 1982; Romaine, 1984). This article addresses such issues by examining variation in the use of perfect have and its alternatives in the Trinidadian creole continuum. The alternatives to have include other Standard English (SE) forms (e.g., the past), as well as forms like perfective O, completive done , and others which function in the Trinidadian Creole (TC) system. The analysis is based on data from a sample of speakers from different social backgrounds. The variation described here is part of a wider pattern involving different strategies for expressing the various meanings associated with the perfect in SE, namely, the “continuative,” “experiential,” and “resulative” interpretations of have . TC employs different strategies for expressing these meanings. Perfective O is used (along with apporopriate adverbial specifications) to convey the experiential meaning; progressive - in , O copula, or O-marked statives convey the continuative sense; and completive done competes with prefective O to convey the resultative sense. All of these may vary with have . I discuss at length the procedures that are used to define the variable and the equivalents of have that are identified. A quantitative analysis reveals clear patterns of variation according to class, subcategory of perfect, and predicate type. The differences in the use of have are explained in terms of varying degrees of influences from vernacular norms among the social groups, as well as the availability of alternative choices to have within the pragmatic and grammatical environments. Finally, I indicate the implications of this investigation for the study of morphosyntactic variation in other divergent dialect situations. Specifically, the findings are relevant to situations, such as AAVE, which involve variation between standard and nonstandard strategies for expressing the meanings associated with the perfect and other morophosyntactic categories.

Some Issues in the Study of Language Contact

This paper provides an overview of various approaches to contact-induced change, and assesses their contribution to a unified theory of the processes involved in such change, and the outcomes they produce. I argue that clarification of the terminology and classifications we apply to contact languages can lead to better understanding of the types of contact languages, and the kinds of process that produce them. I further suggest that van Coetsems framework offers a more uniform terminology and classification, and that it clarifies the distinction between the two major transfer types involved in contact induced change – borrowing via recipient language agentivity, and imposition via source language agentivity. Failure to distinguish these two mechanisms accurately has negative implications for our understanding of the processes by which various contact languages are created. I apply this model to two broad categories of contact languages, bilingual mixed languages, and creoles, and I argue that the differences in transfer type identified by Van Coetsem correspond to differences in the language production processes underlying the two broad types of contact-induced change. Finally, I suggest that psycholinguistic models of language or speech production can contribute significantly to our understanding of the different processes involved in the creation of different types of contact languages.

Phonological Hypercorrection in the Process of Decreolization--the Case of Trinidadian English.

It is now well established that creole language situations such as those that exist in West Indian communities like Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, etc., are characterized by continuing variation resulting from increasing modification of Creole structures in the direction of the lexically-related model language. The pace of the modification depends in turn on such factors as the degree of social mobility and the strength of corrective pressures from above. In all such cases, however, there develops ‘a continuous linguistic spectrum of speech varieties… which includes all possible intermediate varieties’ (DeCamp, 1971: 28).

Stativity and other aspects of the creole passive

Abstract This paper investigates passive structures in Carribean French Creole (CFC) and takes issue with the analysis proposed for Dominican French Creole (DFC) by Amastae (1983). Using a broad data-base drawn primarily from DFC and St. Lucian Creole French, it argues that there is no justification for A.s claim that DFC passives are embedded under a higher-predicate BE. Evidence is also presented that CFC passivization is a productive process, with few restrictions on subject-type or tense/aspect marking of the sort A claims. An alternative analysis is presented, in which the CFC passive is treated as a simplex structure, directly generated by the base. It is argued that CFC passivization is limited to a restricted class of ambi-transitive verbs whose essentially actional character is preserved in their passive use. The derivation is best handled by a lexical rule which relates active and passive verb pairs. The distinction between passive and anti-causative constructions is also discussed as well as its implications for the rule of final-vowel truncation in Isle de France Creole. Finally, there is some discussion of the possible sources of the Creole passive in West African languages.