The perfect in English-lexifier pidgins and creoles
A comparative study
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.
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
References
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