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Article published In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 34:2 (2019) ► pp.195–242

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The perfect in English-lexifier pidgins and creoles

A comparative study

 | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany
Published online: 25 November 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00039.hac
Abstract
This study investigates the expression of perfect meanings in thirty English-lexifier pidgins and creoles or related varieties, such as African American Vernacular English or Singlish. The data were elicited with the help of sixteen sentences and a short text from Dahl’s (Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 198–206) typological tense-aspect questionnaire. The perfective, as the perfect’s ‘anti-prototype’ (. 2014. The perfect map: Investigating the crosslinguistic distribution of TAME categories in a parallel corpus. In Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Bernhard Wälchli (eds.). Aggregating dialectology, typology, and register analysis. Linguistic variation in text and speech, 268–289. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 273), is also considered. The possession of a grammaticalized perfect category is particularly frequent in West Africa, where it is likely to constitute a case of substrate influence; moreover, the gram is considerably less frequent in English-lexifier pidgins and creoles than in non-creole languages, which may be related to recent grammaticalization processes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The perfect as a crosslinguistic category
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Uses of the perfect in English-lexifier P&Cs
    • 4.1The perfect of result
    • 4.2The experiential perfect
    • 4.3The perfect of persistent situation
    • 4.4The perfect of recent past
  • 5.The perfective in English-lexifier P&Cs
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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