This volume in memory of Terry Crowley covers a wide range of languages: Australian, Oceanic, Pidgins and Creoles, and varieties of English. Part I, Linguistic Description and Typology, includes chapters on topics such as complex predicates and verb serialization, noun incorporation, possessive… read more
The importance of dialect in indexing identity has been well described for ethnic and regional dialects, such as African American English (e.g. Rickford & Rickford 2000) and Pittsburghese (e.g. Johnstone & Kiesling 2008), but not so much for national dialect (although Portnoy 2011 on Austrian… read more
The Relative Pronoun strategy is commonly used for relativization in European languages such as English – for example: The woman [ who won the lottery ] is my neighbour. In this strategy the head nominal (here the woman) is indicated inside the relative clause by a clause-initial pronominal… read more
Creoles (here including expanded pidgins) are commonly viewed as being more analytic than their lexifiers and other languages in terms of grammatical marking. The purpose of the study reported in this article was to examine the validity of this view by measuring the frequency of analytic (and… read more
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many grammatical features of Pacific Pidgin English, New South Wales Pidgin English and Chinese Pidgin English were attested in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), Solomon Islands, New Guinea Islands, Hawai‘i and the Northern Territory of Australia.… read more
More than 38,000 Chinese came to Australia to prospect for gold in the second half of the 19th century. Most of them originated from the Canton region of China (now Guangdong), where Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) was an important trading language. This article describes a recently discovered source… read more
Bickerton (1981) argues against the influence of substrate languages in creoles, using the term “cafeteria principle” to ridicule the idea that a language could select features from various sources like items chosen for lunch at a cafeteria. However, this chapter demonstrates that several aspects… read more
Looking up ‘creolization’ on any data base, or doing a search at amazon.com or simply googling the term will show that it is more widely used outside linguistics than inside – especially in anthropology, sociology, history and literary studies. Jourdan (2001: 2903) notes that the term has been… read more
This study examines research on transfer in second language acquisition (SLA) in order to identify situational and linguistic factors which may constrain the influence of substrate languages on the developing grammar of a pidgin or creole. A distinction is made between the earlier transfer of L1… read more
Recent descriptions of literacy in the English-lexified pidgins and Creoles of Melanesia and Australia have described it as being imposed by outsiders, irrelevant to speakers of these languages and unsuitable for use in formal education. This article presents an opposing point of view. First it… read more
This article reports on a preliminary study of an English-lexifier Pidgin spoken on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru. This pidgin has distinctive features of both Chinese Pidgin English and Pacific Pidgin English, as well as many unique characteristics. Socio-historical information shows that… read more
