This book offers an in-depth treatment of a variety of morpho-syntactic issues in Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) both from a descriptive and theoretical perspective. The investigated topics include the determiner system, Tense, Mood, Aspect markers and pronominal paradigms. The study of TMA markers reveals morpho-syntactic configurations with interesting ramifications for syntactic theory and parametric variation. This book targets creolists, theoretical linguists, and the Cape Verdean community. Given the diversified targeted audience, the descriptive chapters are purposefully kept separate from their theoretical counterparts, presenting issues that are later revisited in the Minimalist framework. The data used in this study are primarily drawn from 83 transcribed interviews from a pool of 187 speakers. The interviews were collected during fieldwork conducted in 1997, 2000 and 2001 in the Cape Verdean Sotavento (leeward) islands representing the more basilectal varieties of the creole. As all natural languages, CVC displays syntactic similarities and differences with other creoles and noncreoles. Hence, in the spirit of comparative syntax, this volume compares CVC to other creoles like Guinea-Bissau Creole and to noncreoles like Portuguese, French, Icelandic and Italian dialects.

This book offers an in-depth treatment of a variety of morpho-syntactic issues in Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) both from a descriptive and theoretical perspective. The investigated topics include the determiner system, Tense, Mood, Aspect markers and pronominal paradigms. The study of TMA markers reveals morpho-syntactic configurations with interesting ramifications for syntactic theory and parametric variation. This book targets creolists, theoretical linguists, and the Cape Verdean community. Given the diversified targeted audience, the descriptive chapters are purposefully kept separate from their theoretical counterparts, presenting issues that are later revisited in the Minimalist framework. The data used in this study are primarily drawn from 83 transcribed interviews from a pool of 187 speakers. The interviews were collected during fieldwork conducted in 1997, 2000 and 2001 in the Cape Verdean Sotavento (leeward) islands representing the more basilectal varieties of the creole. As all natural languages, CVC displays syntactic similarities and differences with other creoles and noncreoles. Hence, in the spirit of comparative syntax, this volume compares CVC to other creoles like Guinea-Bissau Creole and to noncreoles like Portuguese, French, Icelandic and Italian dialects.

This study seeks to answer some fundamental questions in Creole studies: which structural features are shared by all the world's Creoles, and to what extent are the traits typical of Atlantic Creoles also found elsewhere in the world?

This book describes the Portuguese-based Creole which is widely spoken as a first language in Guinea-Bissau. The study focuses on one variety, 'central Kriyol', and its main aim is to present a complete description of the grammar of the language. The theoretical framework for the syntactic analysis is purposely eclectic but relies primarily on Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and ample attention is paid to the cognitive or semantic dimension in the explanation of linguistic facts. After a short introduction on the history and phonology of the language and the organization of the study, there are chapters dealing with the simple sentence, Tense and Aspect, the noun phrase, the complex sentence, topicalization/focalization/questions, and Middles/Passives/Causatives. The final chapter discusses Kriyol texts, especially comic-books, from which a considerable number of examples used in the study are taken.

This volume offers a thorough examination of the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse properties of noun phrases in a wide variety of creole (and non-creole) languages including Cape Verdean Creole, Santome, Papiamentu, Guinea-Bissau Creole, Mindanao Chabacano, Réunionnais Creole, Lesser Antillean, Haitian Creole, Mauritian Creole, Seychellois, Sranan, Jamaican Creole, Berbice Dutch Creole and African American English. Comparative studies also consider the determiner systems of Middle and Modern French, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Ewe, Fon and Gun. This compilation of 16 chapters brings together descriptive, theoretical, diachronic and synchronic studies that focus on the structure and interpretation of bare nouns in creoles. The contributions demonstrate the variety and complex nature of determiner systems in creoles and their widespread use of bare nouns in comparison to their source languages. This volume is evidence of the relevance of creole languages to theories of language creation, language change and linguistic theory in general.

Within the framework of Chomsky’s Principles and Parameters Theory and the Minimalist Program, this work presents a detailed discussion of the different types of wh-question formation and relativization strategies in Cape Verdean Creole (Santiago variety), especially focusing on wh-movement of PPs. The book explores the Copy Theory of Movement, discussing a defective copy construction involving wh-movement of PPs which poses interesting theoretical questions as to how the defective copy is to be generated and form a chain with the relevant displaced wh-constituent. It is also shown that the defective copy strategy ([wh[PL] ... el[3SG]]) is distinct from resumption ([wh[PL] ... es[3PL]]) due to some properties of PPs in Cape Verdean Creole and to the nature of the pronominal element that occurs at the foot of the wh-chain. This book relates well with those on Cape Verdean Creole and highlights the need to look more closely at deeper syntactic issues in more creole languages, inspiring further comparative work amongst creole linguists.

While universally present in languages, negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages, however, negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language, generally exhibit negative concord, a construction popularly dubbed ‘double negation’, where several expressions, each negative on its own, come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction – problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerge from the meaning of their parts – has fostered much research, the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely taken into account. Aiming at bridging this gap, this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed, the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.