Suzanne Romaine

Donald Winford

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Mervyn C. Alleyne

Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo

This book explores the manner in which language and language choice reflect and mediate the social landscape of those societies that evolved from European-conceived and controlled plantation labor systems. These plantation systems merged the lives of people of different nations, cultures, and languages so that they could serve as either indentured workers or slaves. For this reason, creole language studies-- more than any other area of linguistics-- provides invaluable insight into the nature of diaspora, ethnicity, nationalism, identity, and language loyalty.

Language & the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations

Francis Byrne

For review see: Silvia Kouwenberg, in New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 70, no. 3 & 4 (1996); p. 369-371.

Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages

On the Typology of Creole TMA Systems

This is the first major study of the conservative or basilectal English creoles of the Anglophone Caribbean since Bailey's (1966) and Bickerton's (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).

Predication in Caribbean English Creoles

Kees De Bot

Ludmila Isurin

The volume presents a selection of contributions by leading scholars in the field of code-switching. In the past the phenomenon of code-switching was studied within different subfields of linguistics and they all took their own perspectives on code-switching without taking into account findings from other subdisciplines. This book raises a question of a much broader multidisciplinary approach to studying the phenomenon of code-switching, calls for integration of disciplines; and illustrates how frameworks from one subfield can be applied to models in another. The volume includes survey chapters, empirical studies, contributions that use empirical data to test new hypotheses about code-switching, or suggest new approaches and models for the study of code-switching, and chapters that discuss principles and constraints of code-switching, and code-switching vs. transfer. The book is easily accessible to anyone who is interested in the phenomenon of code-switching in bilinguals.

Donald Winford

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