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Article published In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 40:1 (2025) ► pp.176–197

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Guest column

Why all the fuss about bare nouns in English-related creoles?

ORCiD logo with link | Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France
Published online: 26 May 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.25005.pre
Abstract
The heightened scholarly attention given to the absence of articles in creoles since the 1990s leaves an impression of a linguistic particularism. But are articleless nouns in English-related creoles so peculiar? If bare nouns are characteristic of creoles, their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic behaviour are not wholly unexpected, given the relatively small number of mismatches observed in the comparative data I provide in this column. A comparative view of textual corpora extracted from translations of Le Petit Prince in Jamaican, Vincentian and English shows compelling grammatical affinities between the three languages. Apart from a minimal number of innovations, bare nouns in the creoles function very much like English bare nominals. I illustrate these affinities using the semantico-pragmatic notions of presupposed identifiability and contextual salience, which facilitate the interpretation of bare nouns.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Generalities on bare noun phrases
  • 3.The absence of articles in English-related creoles
    • 3.1Early attestations of bare nouns in Jamaican and Vincentian
    • 3.2Bare nouns in contemporary English-related creoles
  • 4.Bare nouns in English-related creole translations of Le Petit Prince
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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