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Description:
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This book offers an in-depth study of the overall syntax of (basilectal)
Jamaican Creole, the first since Bailey (1966). The author, a Jamaican
linguist, meticulously examines distributional and interpretative
properties of functional morphology in Jamaican Creole (JC) from a
cartographic perspective (Cinque 1999, 2002; Rizzi 1997, 2004), thus
exploring to what extent the grammar of JC provides morphological
manifestations of an articulate IP, CP and DP. The data considered in this
work offers new evidence in favour of these enriched structural analyses,
and the instances where surface orders differ from the underlying
functional skeleton are accounted for in terms of movement operations. This
investigation of Jamaican syntax therefore allows us to conclude that the
'poor' inflectional morphology typical of Creole languages in general and
of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole in particular does not correlate with poor
structural architecture. Indeed the free morphemes discussed, as well as
the word order considerations that indicate syntactic movement to
designated projections, serve as arguments in favour of a rich underlying
functional map.
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