This volume presents a careful selection of fifteen articles presented at the SPCL meetings in Atlanta, Boston and Hawai'i in 2003 and 2004. The contributions reflect – from various perspectives and using different types of data – on the interplay between structure and variation in contact languages, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributors consider a wide range of languages, including Surinamese creoles, Chinook Jargon, Yiddish, AAVE, Haitian Creole, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese varieties, Nigerian Pidgin, Sri Lankan Malay, Papiamentu, and Bahamian Creole English (Hackert). A need to question and test existing claims regarding pidginization/creolization is evident in all contributions, and the authors provide analyses for a variety of grammatical structures: VO-ordering and affixation, agglutination, negation, TMAs, plural marking, the copula, and serial verb constructions. The volume provides ample evidence for the observation that pidgin/creole studies is today a mature subfield of linguistics which is making important contributions to general linguistic theory.

Table of contents

Introduction Ana Deumert and Stephanie Durrleman 1–6 Part I: Structure The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan Jeff Good 9–28 Tracing the origin of modality in the creoles of Suriname Bettina Migge 29–59 Modelling Creole Genesis: Headedness in morphology Tonjes Veenstra 61–83 The restructuring of tense/aspect systems in creole formation Donald Winford 85–110 Syntactic properties of negation in Chinook Jargon, with a comparison of two source languages Zvjezdana Vrzić 111–133 Sri Lankan Malay morphosyntax: Lankan or Malay? Peter Slomanson 135–158 Sri Lanka Malay: Creole or convert? Ian R. Smith and Scott Paauw 159–181 The advantages of a blockage-based etymological dictionary for proven or putative relexified languages: (Extrapolating from the Yiddish experience) Paul Wexler 183–199 Part II: Variation A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE Chris Collins 203–224 Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English Stephanie Hackert 225–242 Aspects of variation in educated Nigerian Pidgin: Verbal structures Dagmar Deuber 243–261 A linguistic time-capsule: Plural /s/ reduction in Afro-Portuguese and Afro-Hispanic historical texts Fernanda L. Ferreira 263–289 The progressive in the spoken Papiamentu of Aruba Tara Sanchez 291–314 Was Haitian ever more like French? Mikael Parkvall 315–335 The late transfer of serial verb constructions as stylistic variants in Saramaccan creole Marvin Kramer 337–372 Index 373–376