18. Functional deficiency, ellipsis or innovation in creole languages?

In this Postface, one of our primary objectives as editors, is to weave together into a coherent whole the insights and analyses of our contributors. We aim to show how the chapters in the volume complement each other, highlighting both similarities and differences in the patterns of the nominal system of various creole languages. A second objective is to try to formulate some hypotheses regarding the use of bare nouns in creole languages and the role of Universal Grammar in shaping the linguistic properties of the creoles under study. To the degree that creole bare nouns have common properties, we try to identify the grammatical options that UG makes available to natural languages in the domain of the Noun Phrase.