Urban Bahamian Creole
System and variation
Author
This volume, a detailed empirical study of the creole English spoken in the Bahamian capital, Nassau, contributes to our understanding of both urban creoles and tense-aspect marking in creoles. The first part traces the development of a creole in the Bahamas via socio-demographic data and outlines its current status and functions vis-à-vis the standard in politics, the media, and education. The linguistic chapters combine typological and variationist methods to describe exhaustively a comprehensive grammatical subsystem, past temporal reference, offering a discourse-based approach to such controversial categories as the preverbal past marker. The quantitative analysis of variable past inflection, finally, tests not only well-known constraints, such as stativity or social class, but also ethnographically determined ones, such as narrative type. Its results are relevant not only to the study of Caribbean English-lexifier creoles and related varieties, such as African American English, but also to variation and change in urban dialects generally.
[Varieties of English Around the World, G32] 2004. xiv, 256 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Map | p. VIII
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Abbreviations | p. IX
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List of Tables | p. X
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List of Figures | p. XII
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Acknowledgements | p. XIII
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1. Introduction | p. 1
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2. Methodology | p. 5
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3 .Sociohistory and Sociolinguistics | p. 31
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4. Past Temporal Reference: Categories, Meanings, and Uses | p. 65
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5. Past Marking by Verb Inflection | p. 117
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6. Conclusion | p. 221
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Appendix | p. 225
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Index | p. 249
“Stephanie Hackert's Urban Bahamian Creole (UBC) is the most thorough examination of Bahamian grammar to date.”
Jeffrey Reaser, in English World-Wide 28(1), 2007
“Bahamian now joins the handful of Creoles for which fully accountable, empirical studies of sociolinguistic variation exist. Hackert’s theoretical and typological framework is fully up-to-date, while she confirms and advances our understanding of Creole tense, aspect, and discourse genre. Her ethnographic knowledge of Nassau is considerable, and her writing respects and illuminates her speakers’ life experiences. An exemplary work, valuable to all creolists, sociolinguists, typologists and students of English varieties.”
Peter L Patrick, University of Essex
“Urban Bahamian Creole. System and Variation proves valuable, as it investigates a subject (urban creoles) and a creole (Bahamian Creole English) that have received limited attention in creole studies. This book provides a rich source of urban Bahamian Creole English data, while also offering typological and quantitative analyses that will facilitate future cross-linguistic investigations. This is an excellent book that builds on existing work in Bahamian Creole English, and by extension, fills important gaps in our knowledge of tense-aspect systems in grammatical, pragmatic and sociolinguistic contexts in other CEC's.”
Helean McPhee, The College of the Bahamas, in Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 21(2), 2006
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2016. Standards of English in the Caribbean. In World Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G57], ► pp. 85 ff.
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2013. Reference Guide for Varieties of English. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English, ► pp. 363 ff.
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2014. 9. Conclusion. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 205 ff.
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2014. 7. Other grammatical features: An overview. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 147 ff.
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2014. 3. Jersey English in context. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 25 ff.
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2014. 6. Features of the Jersey English verb phrase. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 103 ff.
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2014. Appendix 1. Written questionnaire. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 229 ff.
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2014. Acknowledgements. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. ix ff.
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2014. 4. Methods and data. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 43 ff.
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2014. 8. Standardization, levelling and identity in Jersey: A bird’s eye perspective. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 181 ff.
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2014. 2. Theoretical foundations. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 7 ff.
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2014. Index. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 235 ff.
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2014. 5. Discourse marker eh. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 69 ff.
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2014. References. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 213 ff.
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2014. 1. Introduction. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 1 ff.
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2014. Appendix 2. Excerpt from a transcript. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. 233 ff.
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2014. List of maps, figures and tables. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48], ► pp. xi ff.
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Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General