Creole tense/mood/aspect systems : the unmarked case?

Abstract

The following list, which appeared in Voorhoeve (1973) and is based largely on Taylor (1960), gives the three particles for a number of Creole languages:Tense Mood Aspect Saramaccan bi sa/o td Papiamentu tab a lo ta Hongkong Macanese ja logo ta Indo-Portuguese di ta Philippine Creole y a de/ay ta Cayenne Creole te wa/ke ka Lesser Antilles te ke ka Haitian te ava apé Jamaican ben wi a ¡da Sranan ben sa/go (d)e Krio bin go dè Negerhollands ha lo le Caboverdiano ja lo ta This list, although in part inaccurate and incomplete, gives an impression of the remarkable uniformity existing in tills respect among Creole lan guages of widely different areas and of widely different lexical orgins.Taylor and Thompson, and later Voorhoeve, tried to explain this similarity in historical terms, by appealing to the existence of a Portu guese-based trading and slaving pidgin in many parts of the world during the 16th and 17th centuries.This Portuguese pidgin would have possessed the tense, mood, and aspect particles, and the Creole languages listed in (11) would be historically derived from this Portuguese pidgin through the process of relexification.Relexification is the massive substitution of vocabulary while maintaining basic grammatical structure.The historical explanation claims that the peculiarities of the Creole tense/mood/aspect system are a historical accident, going back to the Portuguese pidgin.No claims are made concerning the universality of this system. UNIVERSALIST EXPLANATIONSBickerton's paper 'Creolization, Linguistic Universals, Natural Semantax and the Brain' (1975) attempts to explain the similarities between the preverbal particle systems of the Creole languages by appealing to universal features of human perception.

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