Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English
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Stephanie Hackert
Abstract
This paper presents a quantitative analysis of past inflection in urban Bahamian Creole English. The variable has held a prominent position in the study of African American Vernacular English and Caribbean creoles, but whereas phonological, grammatical, and social factors have received much attention in this context, the influence of style or discourse type has rarely been noted. I analyze the formal and functional properties of three types of oral narrative obtained in sociolinguistic interviews. All of them, personal narrative as well as folktale and ‘generic’ narrative, show considerably lower inflection rates compared to the ‘chat’ mode but do so for different reasons; this, in turn, has repercussions for cross-variety comparisons, as samples usually differ in terms of their composition with regard to discourse type.
Abstract
This paper presents a quantitative analysis of past inflection in urban Bahamian Creole English. The variable has held a prominent position in the study of African American Vernacular English and Caribbean creoles, but whereas phonological, grammatical, and social factors have received much attention in this context, the influence of style or discourse type has rarely been noted. I analyze the formal and functional properties of three types of oral narrative obtained in sociolinguistic interviews. All of them, personal narrative as well as folktale and ‘generic’ narrative, show considerably lower inflection rates compared to the ‘chat’ mode but do so for different reasons; this, in turn, has repercussions for cross-variety comparisons, as samples usually differ in terms of their composition with regard to discourse type.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- Introduction 1
-
Part I: Structure
- The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan 9
- Tracing the origin of modality in the creoles of Suriname 29
- Modelling Creole Genesis 61
- The restructuring of tense/aspect systems in creole formation 85
- Syntactic properties of negation in Chinook Jargon, with a comparison of two source languages 111
- Sri Lankan Malay morphosyntax 135
- Sri Lanka Malay 159
- The advantages of a blockage-based etymological dictionary for proven or putative relexified languages 183
-
Part II: Variation
- A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE 203
- Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English 225
- Aspects of variation in educated Nigerian Pidgin 243
- A linguistic time-capsule 263
- The progressive in the spoken Papiamentu of Aruba 291
- Was Haitian ever more like French? 315
- The late transfer of serial verb constructions as stylistic variants in Saramaccan creole 337
- Index 373
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- Introduction 1
-
Part I: Structure
- The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan 9
- Tracing the origin of modality in the creoles of Suriname 29
- Modelling Creole Genesis 61
- The restructuring of tense/aspect systems in creole formation 85
- Syntactic properties of negation in Chinook Jargon, with a comparison of two source languages 111
- Sri Lankan Malay morphosyntax 135
- Sri Lanka Malay 159
- The advantages of a blockage-based etymological dictionary for proven or putative relexified languages 183
-
Part II: Variation
- A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE 203
- Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English 225
- Aspects of variation in educated Nigerian Pidgin 243
- A linguistic time-capsule 263
- The progressive in the spoken Papiamentu of Aruba 291
- Was Haitian ever more like French? 315
- The late transfer of serial verb constructions as stylistic variants in Saramaccan creole 337
- Index 373
