Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar
Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar
This study focuses on the cognitive processes involved in creole genesis: relexification, reanalysis, and direct leveling. The role of these processes is documented by a detailed comparison of Haitian creole with its two major contributing languages, French and Fongbe, to illustrate how mechanisms from source languages show themselves in creole. The author examines the input of adult, as opposed to child, speakers and resolves the problems in the three main approaches, universalist, superstratist and substratist, which have been central to the recent debate on creole development.
- Resolves the problems with the three main approaches to creole genesis (the universalist, the superstratist and substratist approaches)
- Based on a more detailed comparison of a greater volume of data from the creole, superstratum and substratum languages than has ever been examined before
- Approaches the problem from the perspective of generative grammar
Reviews & endorsements
"...[this book] is a model of careful argumentation, including clear description of the methods and assumptions involved in the underlying research...the book is admittedly written for those with special interest in pidgin and creole languages..." Linguistics
Product details
February 2011Adobe eBook Reader
9780511889530
0 pages
0kg
13 tables
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1. The problem of creole genesis and linguistic theory
- 2. Cognitive processes involved in creole genesis
- 3. The research methodology
- 4. Functional category lexical entries involved in nominal structure
- 5. The preverbal markers encoding relative tense, mood and aspect
- 6. Pronouns
- 7. Functional category lexical entries involved in the structure of the clause
- 8. The determiner and the structure of the clause
- 9. The syntactic properties of verbs
- 10. Are derivational affixes relexified? 11. The concatenation of words in compounds
- 12. Parameters
- 13. Evaluation of the hypothesis
- 14. Theoretical consequences
- Appendices
- Notes
- References
- Indexes.
