The perfect in English-lexifier pidgins and creoles

Abstract

Abstract 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.

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