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

The perfect in English-lexifier pidgins and creoles

A comparative study

| Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany
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 (1985: 198–206) typological tense-aspect questionnaire. The perfective, as the perfect’s ‘anti-prototype’ (Dahl 2014: 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.
Keywords: English-lexifier pidgins and creoles, typology, perfect of result, experiential, persistent situation, recent past, perfective, substrate influence, creole exceptionalism, grammaticalization
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
Published online: 25 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00039.hac
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