The study of linguistic variation in the Caribbean has been central to the emergence of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics as an academic field. It has yielded influential theory, such as the (post-)creole continuum or the 'Acts of Identity' models, that has shaped sociolinguistics far beyond creole… read more
Based on a corpus of private email from Jamaican university students, this study explores the discourse functions of Jamaican Creole in computer-mediated communication. From this participant-centered perspective, it contributes to the longstanding theoretical debates in creole studies about the… read more
This paper contributes to a small, but quickly growing body of literature that looks at orthographic variation as a semiotic resource with which social stances and relations are expressed and created. First, we analyze a corpus of blog and email writing from Jamaica and its diaspora — two settings… read more
This is a paper about language variation and about language change, investigating the competition between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in Modern English (written and spoken, British and American) as a case study. Drawing on a range of spoken and written corpora and considering a multivariate… read more
