Creole Continuum Bickerton

Linguistic Society of America
The Nature of a Creole Continuum Author(s): Derek Bickerton Source: Language, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Sep., 1973), pp. 640-669 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/412355 Accessed: 10/02/2010 22:06
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THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

DEREK BICKERTON
University of Hawaii
Hitherto, post-Saussurean linguistic theories have been unable to provide satisfactory descriptions of a creole continuum. This paper reviews previous attempts in the field, and indicates the need for a different theoretical orientation-one which would replace static, synchronic models of polar dialects with a single dynamic model incorporating both these and all the intermediate variations. In support of this argument, two sub-systems of the Guyanese creole continuumthe copulative and the pronominal-are described in terms of the dynamic evolution of the continuum as a whole; and it is demonstrated that, far from being an area of random variation, such a continuum represents a series of developmental stages ordered in accordance with basic principles of linguistic change. Finally, it is claimed that both the theory and the methodology advanced here cannot be limited to creole situations, but must have universal validity.1 PREVIOUS STUDIES OF THE CONTINUUM
1.1. The general nature of a creole dialect continuum has been understood at least since Reinecke & Tokimasa 1934, and its specific application to the Caribbean (in particular, Jamaica) has been extensively discussed over the past decade (Le Page & DeCamp 1960; Alleyne 1963; B. Bailey 1966, Ch. 1; DeCamp 1971, etc.) The last-named writer uses the term 'post-creole continuum'; but since something marginally, if at all, different from the original creole language frequently constitutes the basilect of the continuum, 'post-' can be misleading for Jamaica or Guyana, if not for Trinidad or the Black dialect system of the U.S. So far, we have had descriptions of such basilects (e.g. Turner 1949, B. Bailey 1966-the latter by far the most rigorous to date) and, more rarely, of their corresponding acrolects (e.g. Pompilus 1961). Little, however, has been done on the area between them; and indeed, according to Alleyne (1963:25), 'measurement of linguistic ability for purposes of classification of a speaker or of situating him at a particular point in the continuum is a difficult if not impossible task'. 1.2. Whether this difficulty arises from the nature of the task itself, or from limitations imposed by a particular theoretical orientation, is open to question. Post-Saussurean linguistic theory, whether structural or generative, is singularly ill-adapted to handle a continuum situation. As Chomsky (1965:3) roundly states: 'Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community ... This seems to me to have been the position of the founders of modern linguistics, and no cogent reason for
1 An earlier and slightly different draft of this paper was presented at the Caribbean Linguistics Conference at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, in April 1971. I am grateful to the participants for their discussion, and also to William Labov and Charles-James Bailey for their detailed comments; any errors or omissions remaining are my sole responsibility. The research on which the paper is based was assisted by a grant from the Ford Foundation for the Dialect Survey of Guyana. 640
THE NATURE OF A CREOLECONTINUUM
641
modifyingit has been offered.'In fact, orthodoxlinguistictheory dealt exclusively in terms of static models of discrete languagesand dialects, and data in which could not readily be incorporated such models were consignedto the 'wastebasketof performance' (Labov 1969:759), absolvingthe linguist of any might obligationto accountfor it. The only possibilityopenin such a framework seem to be 'to capturethe variationswithinthe two poles by additionalrulesto the grammarsof each' (Alleyne 1964:25)-which, as Alleyne himself realized, which runs one immediatelyinto the problemof how to decide,non-arbitrarily, variation to relate to which grammar.Indeed, no one seems even to have atThose who essayedthe continuumat all foundthemtemptedsuch a procedure. selves obligedin practiceto fall back on ad-hocmethods. 1.3. Allsopp 1958, 1962 deservesevery credit for his pioneeringwork on the with which he recordedall Guyanese continuum,and for the scrupulousness variant forms;few linguistsso fully satisfy Labov's 'principle accountability' of the (1969:737-8,fn. 20). But inevitably,considering time at whichit waswritten, his worksuffersfromtheoreticaldefects. Perhapsthe most criticalof these is its attempt to relate all the variants describedto some homogeneous'Georgetown dialect';recognitionthat this is an impossibilitymust be the beginning,not the of studiesin Guyana.In at least one respect,however, finishing-point, continuum his Allsopp'swork is far from being superseded; field methods(use of surreptitious recording,of an intermediaryto set up 'pseudo-real' situationsetc.) still containvaluablelessonsfor the field linguist. 1.4. The second attempt I shall deal with (B. Bailey 1971) is not an actual description,but rather a novel and ingenious technique for determiningthe distance of given (non-polar)texts from either pole of the continuum.Briefly, it consists of countingthe numberof rule changesnecessaryto convert a text into one or the other, then expressing result in terms of a proportionwhich the will show the text's approximate positionon the continuum.(The precisedetails need not concernus here.) Unfortunately,it is based on an assumptionwhich followslogicallyfrom generativeprinciples, which,as I shall show,is almost but certainly incorrect: that the continuum is simply producedby the random mutual interferenceof two discrete and self-consistentgrammars(in this case the grammars JamaicanCreoleand StandardJamaicanEnglish).If this were of the case, the continuumwould be non-rule-governed; principleddescriptionof it would be quite literally impossible,and one's sole recoursewould indeed be ad-hocdescription individualtexts. In all fairnessto Bailey, I must emphasize of that it is clear,fromher presentation,that she herselfregardsthe techniqueas a utilitarianstop-gapratherthan as a contribution theory. to 1.6. Finally, DeCamp 1971 avoids the pitfalls of the two previousattempts: he realizesthat the continuumis not amenableto either monosystemic bisysor temic treatment, yet he accepts the fact that it must be rule-governed. His discovery of the existenceof implicationalrelationsin the continuum-crucial for generallinguisticsas well as for creolestudies-constitutes such an immense advanceon previousanalysesthat it may seem churlishto criticizeit. However, all explorers sufferthe same handicap;their view of the terrainwhichthey con-
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VOLUME NUMBER3 (1973) LANGUAGE, 49,
quer will never be as clear and all-embracing as that of those who painlessly follow in their laboriously hacked paths. E.g., the fact that DeCamp considers only binary alternates must now appear as a defect; one characteristic bf the mesolect2 seems to be that it contains, not merely forms from the polar lects, but forms which in function, if not always in phonetic shape, are peculiar to itself. Some which we shall have occasion to deal with later on are i and shi for 3sg. fern. object pronoun (basilect am, acrolect (h)or); bin for copula (past tense) in the environment _ PRED ADJ (basilect 0, acrolect woz, wor); 0 for locative verb (basilect de, acrolect inflected to be). Others which we shall not have space to discuss are doz, doz bi, en as negator, dem as plural article, non-emphatic did, the syllable-final consonant clusters /tt id/, abstract nominals such as oplifment, tshupitnis, and many more. Such forms render unreal any statement in terms of binary choice. A second weakness is failure to incorporate intra-individual variation-the case of the almost ubiquitous speaker who sometimes says pikni and sometimes child. A third weakness is the belief (highly dubious, in the light of my own data, drawn from a community very similar to the one DeCamp was describing) that any random selection of grammatical, phonological, and lexical items is sufficient basis for a strict implicational model. Even if the belief is valid, unsystematic selection of items from different linguistic levels is not much help when it comes to the task of description. DeCamp may argue that what he is doing is placing his speakers at their appropriate points on the continuum; but in fact, until he describes it, he hasn't got a continuum to place them on. An implicational ranking of speakers does not, in itself, constitute either a creole continuum or the description of one.
SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
2.1. I have suggested that what creolists need is a metatheory as rigorous as the structuralist or generative ones, but with a wholly different concept of language. Such a one is even now in its birth-pangs, or perhaps I should say is already emitting its first lusty cries. If DeCamp has a strong claim to being its godfather, its lineal parents are Labov (1966, 1969 etc.) and C.-J. Bailey (196970, 1971 etc.) The interpretation that follows, however, while deeply indebted to all three, is strictly my own. 2.2. The new metatheory takes linguistic variation as the center rather than the periphery of language study. We thus assume, until the contrary can be proved, that all variation is rule-governed; consequently the linguist's task is to find the rules, however much these may conflict with theoretical preconceptions, rather than to 'sacrifice' inconvenient data. The metatheory is, as C.-J. Bailey 1971 points out, 'conceptualist'; we regard empirical data (unlike the generativists) as no less and (unlike the structuralists) as no more 'real' than abstract relations, and we exact point-by-point congruence between the two. To achieve its stated ends, our metatheory breaks down the Saussurean dichotomy between
2 To be strictly accurate, one should say 'mesolects'. However, for convenience I use the term 'mesolect' to cover all isolects between the two polar ones.
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synchronic and diachronic studies.3 Language is then seen as a dynamic process evolving through space and time; 'leaky' grammars, variants that fit no system, conflicting native-speaker intuitions-all the problems that vexed previous formulations are now seen as the inevitable consequences of spatial or temporal segmentation of what is really a seamless whole. It follows that to speak of 'dialects' or even perhaps 'languages' may be misleading;4 these terms merely seek to freeze at an arbitrary moment, and to coalesce into an arbitrary whole, phenomena which in nature are ongoing and heterogeneous. A more appropriate unit to work with is the ISOLECT, which we may define as 'any possible set of rules such that it will differ from adjacent sets of rules on a panlectal (implicational) grid by only a single rule-conflict or resolution of such conflict'. A PANLECTAL GRID may be defined as 'the totality of possible sets of rules for an (arbitrarily limited) area in space and/or time, which in turn constitutes a selection from the totality of possible sets of rules for human language'; cf. Table 6, below, or C.-J. Bailey's 'panlectal implicational scale' (1969-70, III:110). A RULE CONFLICT may be defined as 'a situation where, between an isolect A which contains a rule x and an isolect C which contains a rule y, there is a lect B wherein application of rule x alternates with application of rule y'. One current, if relatively minor, issue within the new metatheory (Labov 1969, Bickerton 1971) is whether the existence of such rule conflicts necessitates 'variable rules' which would estimate, in given environments, the relative probability that x or y would be applied. Whatever the outcome, it should be clear that such instability, or 'inherent variability' as Labov calls it, forms a necessary and vital part of language, and is indeed none other than the locomotive of linguistic change. 2.3. It will be noted, moreover, that terms such as 'isolect' or 'panlectal grid' are purely abstract. A given isolect may be realized by one or many speakers, or it may not. Paradoxically, a closer relation between theory and data becomes possible when the two are more clearly separated conceptually. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of previous formulations has been their failure to distinguish adequately the two domains. Terms such as 'the language X', 'a dialect of Y'-already deeply rooted in popular usage-have led a kind of double life, being simultaneously elements in theories ('all and only the sentences of a language', etc.) and objects which those theories were used to analyse. The more abstract approach summarized here may seem awkward and unfamiliar at first; but I hope that the empirical study based on it, from ?3 onward, will serve to clarify it as well as demonstrate its efficacy.
8 According to a recent commentator (Mounin 1968:38), 'Marcel Cohen, un des plus anciens et des plus fideles collaborateurs de Meillet, y a vu et y voit toujours un t6moignage du "temperament dichotomique" de Saussure, et un "cadre ... nullement necessaire a 1'6tude de la linguistique".' There does seem to be something obsessive and unmotivated (by empirical data, at least) in the eternal dichotomizing of the 'father of modern linguistics'. 4 The more extreme form of this statement would not, I think, be accepted by any other linguist at present. I hope to deal with it at length in a forthcoming study of the evolution of the Guyanese continuum.
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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)
2.4. With the foregoing orientation in mind, we can now examine the continuum. A previous study (Bickerton 1971) limited itself to a very narrow areaalternation of tu and fu as complementizer-and showed how the apparently random distribution of these two items could be accounted for on the basis of a rule change which was initiated, probably early in the last century, in a very limited environment; which was then successively generalized to other environments while simultaneously filtering down through socio-economic strata; and which is in consequence complete for some sections of the community, while for others it has scarcely begun. Now there is every reason to believe that the behavior of these complementizers is paradigmatic of the continuum as a whole. In other words, the creole continuum owes its existence to the fact that, after emancipation, the social, political, and economic barriers between whites and non-whites were gradually but progressively weakened-while white norms remained, at least until very recently, dominant in the community as a whole. In consequence, a slowly increasing segment of the creole-speaking population was provided with both opportunity and motivation to modify its linguistic behavior in the direction of the approved variety. Not all, of course, responded equally. Some, rejecting (or rejected by) the superordinate culture, set up cross-currents that slowed up the over-all evolution of the system. For many others, opportunity and motivation were severely limited. Assume, then, that the speaker internalizes his grammar by inducing rules from the output of those with whom he comes into contact (a part of generative theory which I think can surely be retained); thus people in situations such as I have outlined, finding in that output a limited but variable percentage from the target lects, would inevitably internalize marginally different grammars. Moreover, since in many cases this limited percentage would be insufficient for adequate analysis, they would not simply internalize a handful of English rules among their predominantly creole ones; they would, in many cases, internalize rules which were but vague and inaccurate approximations of English rules. In turn, these approximations would form part of the input to the grammars of the next generation of speakers, thus perpetuating them, even while the over-all drift of the system toward English was maintained. It is this process which gives rise to the characteristically mesolectal forms referred to in ?1.5. These forms-the likeliest, in all former treatments, to be shoveled into 'parole' or 'free variation' or some similar conceptual dustbin-turn out to be the key developments without which the true nature of a creole continuum cannot be understood. 2.5. I have described mesolectal rules as 'approximations' of English rules; I do not in any sense wish to imply that they are random or unprincipled. The human mind is a good grammar-formingtool, even where raw data are scant or defective. In the material to be presented in this paper, we shall see two clear tendencies constantly at work. 'Approximations' are not strictly speaking misinterpretations, but rather selections of a genuine part (though only a part) of the actual target rule; this we may call the tendency toward partial selection. Its effects are reinforced by those of the second tendency, which is to make the minimal adjustment in one's grammar consonant with new data; this is perhaps a special case of a far more universal tendency-there are no leaps in nature-usually known as the
645
of 'principle least effort'.As a result of the operationof these two tendencies,the panlectal grid which has 'deep' GuyaneseCreoleas one of its boundaries,and StandardGuyaneseEnglish as the other, graduallybecomespopulatedas more and moreintermediate isolectsare realizedby actualspeakers.5 Eventuallythere comesinto existencethe continuum situationwith whichwe are by now familiar, wherethere is immensediversity both betweenand within individualspeakers, yet where such individuals, with very few exceptions,can be implicationally ranked.Thus, far from being the chaos of randominterference that is generally implied, the continuumrepresentsan orderedand principleddynamicprocess, whichis (as I hope to show) fully describable, theory and, given an appropriate of course,appropriate tools.
SOME METHODOLOGICALCONSIDERATIONS
3.1. Changesin theoryinevitablyinvolvechangeson the level of methodology. Chomsky's Since, in a continuumsituation,no one even remotelyapproximates 'ideal speaker-hearer', linguist can no longerrely on intuitions, his own or the anyone else's. Yet for a decade the linguistic corpus has been dismissed as 'trivial'. It is worth askingwhethertriviality is a necessarypropertyof speech data, or an accidentalone of extant corpuses.The input to the individual's gramis mar-device,whichformsthe basis of his native competence, simply a body of speech data differingfrom the traditional corpus in only two respects-it is quantitatively greater, and far more heterogeneous.The traditional corpus, limited to few or one speaker(s),few or one level(s) of discourse,could not unfairly be describedas 'that body of data from which a homogeneous grammar may most easily be derived'. The data on whichthe presentpaperis basedrepresent attemptto overcome an or at least reducethese defects. It containssome quarter-million words,and is limited simply by the difficultiesof processingmore material.It representsthe output of nearly three hundredspeakers,whose contributions rangefrom a few sentencesto severalthousandwords.To reduceobserverbias, it was recorded by several differentpersons (all but myself native Guyanese)-sometimes openly, sometimessurreptitiously.It includesinterviews,reminiscences, conversations, in speeches,jokes, and folktales,recorded shops,streets,schools,bars,workshops, and private homes, from representatives all Guyana'ssettled regions,social of classes, and ethnic groups.It cannot claim to be an ideal corpus-which would
simply be total access to the speech production of an entire community-and,
vis-A-visthe traditionalcorpus,it has the disadvantage that differentparts of it are not alwaysreadilycomparable with one another.To minimizethis, I shall in each case begin analysiswith the most homogeneous section of the corpus(the Bushlotsample,discussed detailin Bickerton1971),wherethe inhabitantsof a in singlevillagewererecorded a singleinterviewer(withtopicsand circumstances by
6 By this, I certainly do not wish to suggest that either Guyanese Creole or Standard Guyanese English consists of only a single isolect. Indeed, it is very much open to question whether the categories GC, SGE have any validity; certainly they are unsuitable for use as primary terms in formal analysis. They continue, however, to be convenient for informal use, and such use here is merely to assist the reader in conceptualizing the over-all situation.
646
held constant); and only then will I compare results obtained from other, more heterogeneous, sections. Such a process is one of the many means of cross-checking provided by a really heterogeneous corpus. 3.2. Next comes the question of what to describe first-for the description of an entire continuum would be an enormous task, far beyond the scope of a single paper. However, one can illustrate how the continuum works by selecting one or two relatively self-contained areas in the grammar. One must ensure, of course, that these involve categories reaching right across the continuum. E.g., 'perfect tense' would be an inappropriate category, since the basilect has no precise equivalent of English have+en. I shall therefore analyse, first, copulative and quasi-copulative forms; and second, singular pronouns. The choice is a random one; analyses of, e.g., determiners, pluralizers, negation, or the entire verbal system would have been equally possible, and would have yielded very similar results. 3.3. Finally, we need a convention for presenting quite complex material in the limited span of an implicational table. This consists of allotting numerical indices to alternating and equivalent items in their order away from the basilect; i.e., the basilect form will be numbered 1, the form first replacing it will be numbered 2, the next form (if in that category there is a next form) will be numbered 3, and so on. The highest number in any category will indicate the acrolectal form for that category. The presence of two numbers in a single cell indicates the existence of a rule conflict. It will be observed that in most cases such pairs are made up of consecutive numbers, e.g. 12, 23 etc. This provides a further check on the validity of the sequential ordering, since a high number of 14's would indicate that the form allotted to the index 4 should perhaps have been allotted to 2. 3.4. The reader will note a slight variation from normal practice in implicational tables. E.g., in Table 5, the l's in Col. 3 for isolects K and L would normally be considered deviances. It should be clear, however, that such occurrences are quite distinct from isolated deviances at some distance from the item's regular place of disappearance (e.g. isolect O's 12 in Col. 9 of the same table); the former indicate the existence of a prolonged rule conflict. To be sure, on the evidence before us, most rule conflicts in the continuum are resolved fairly quickly; but a few, for reasons which are sometimes rather obscure, persist. It seems as well to recognize this fact by admitting cases as non-deviant where a rule conflict persists 'unbroken' (i.e. where, between its inception and resolution, no lect containing only the second member of the 'conflict pair' intrudes). This merely means that we have to restate the normal implication conditions as follows: deviances apart, the presence of a basilectal index ALONE in a given column implies the presence of similar indices in all columns to the left; while the presence of a non-basilectal index, alone or otherwise, implies the presence of similar indices, alone or otherwise, in all columns to the right. Since some categories show only two alternates, while others show four or more, it should be clear that implicational relations can hold only between basilectal and non-basilectal items, and not between different non-basilectal items.
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3.6. If in one respect I may appearto have relaxedimplicationalstrictness, thereis anotherin whichI have certainlytightenedit. Onecheckon the validity
of implicational tables is the extent to which they are scalable. Scalability is a formal measure of the extent to which implicational tables are 'well-formed', i.e. maintain the conditions specified above; scalability indices shown as percentages in subsequent tables represent the sum of non-deviant cells divided by the sum of cells filled, so that a deviance-free table would be 100 % scalable. In practice, figures around 90 % can be regarded as adequate, sincechancescalabilityforthreeplace tables (e.g. containing 1, 12, and 2 as possible indices) is about 66 %; for five-place ones, it is 50 % or less (and some of the tables which follow are more than five-place). However, there is more than one type of scalability; we shall here consider upward-and-downward vs. downward-only scalability. In upward-anddownward, one may count either higher among lower, or lower among higher indices as deviances; in downward-only, lower among higher indices alone must be counted. The use of the latter type here is doubly motivated. First, it corresponds
SPEAKER
II
III
SPEAKER
III
1
II
-
I
-
1.
2.
tu
tu
-
fu fu tu tu tu fu tu fu tu tu tu tu tu tu
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
TABLE
tu tu fu tu/fu fu tu
tu tu/fu tu tu tu/fu fu fu fu fu tu fu fu fu tu/fu tu/fu fu tu/fu tu fu fu fu fu fu fu tu/fu fu
No data tu
No data fu tu tu tu/fu tu tu/fu fu fu
3. 6. 9. 12. 20. 21. 22. 24. 7. 13. 16. 26. 28. 11. 25. 8. 2. 5. 14. 15. 17. 27. 1. 4.
10. 19.
1
1
1 1 1
1
-
1
1
-
1 1 1
2 2
1 1
1
1
1 42 2 2
-
2 2 2
2
12 12
12
2
2
12 12 2 2
2
2 -
D2 2
2
-
la (= Table 9, Bickerton 1971). Distribution of tu and fu, for Bushlot (W. Berbice) speakers, divided among categories I (after modal and inceptive verbs), II (after desiderative and other 'psychological' verbs), and III (in all other environments).
TABLElb. Data of Table la according to conventions of ?? 3.3-3.5. 1 = fu; 2 = tu; scalability = 94.64%. Note the reversed position of Cols. I-III. Deviations circled.
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3 (1973)
to the intuition that most deviance is 'backward', i.e. reversion to earlier, more basilectal behavior; a lower index among higher ones indicates just this. Second, it is more rigorous, always yielding figures equal to or less than those which may be derived from the upward-and-downward type. E.g., Table 1 in C.-J. Bailey 1970 is 91.4% scalable upward-and-downward, as against 67.2% downwardonly.6 It should hardly need saying that, if the continuum were really formed by random interference between polar lects, scalability figures for implicational tables would be little if any better than chance. As a link between Bickerton 1971 and the present paper, Table 9 of the former is here first repeated (Table la), then expressed in terms of the foregoing conventions (Table lb).
THE GUYANESE COPULA SYSTEM
4.1. We are now in a position to examine copula and quasi-copula forms in the Guyanese continuum. First it is necessary to dispose of some creole folklore, the oft-repeated assertion that creole languages 'have zero copula'. Thus if we treat adjectives as surface verbs (as B. Bailey does for Jamaican Creole, 1966:42-3and supporting arguments can be drawn both from abstract syntax and from the African languages to which Caribbean Creoles are related), we will have to conclude that, in the basilect, there is no such thing as zero copula. Indeed, we can show that, in the basilect, 'adjectives' behave in many ways like all verbs and, with respect to tense-aspect markers, exactly like stative verbs. E.g., they observe identical rules with respect to exclamations, comparatives, and 'predicate copying' in topicalized sentences (note that 'copying' does not apply to noun phrases) :7 (1) a. b. (2) a. b. (3) a. b. c. d.
6
hau i wok! 'How hard he works!' hau i taal! 'How tall he is!' i taak mo danjaan 'He talks more than John.' i ogli mo dan jaan 'He is uglier than John.' na tiif di man tiif? 'Steal, isn't that what the man does?' *na tiif di man? na chupit dz gyal chupit? 'Stupid, isn't that what the girl is?' *na chupit di gyal?
I do not wish to suggest any deficiency in Bailey's table, which deals, not with actual speech data, but with judgments of acceptability. The use of implicational tables in linguistics is too recent for there to be any literature on their typology; it seems likely however that judgmental and speech-data tables would require different treatment. 7 The orthography for all citations from Guyanese speech is based on that originated by Cassidy 1960 and subsequently used in most publications on Jamaican speech (e.g. B. Bailey 1966:13-14). There are slight differences between the vowel systems of the two areas. Consonants are: p b t d k g; m n ng (/n/); j (/d3/) ch (/tJ/); f v s z sh (///); I r; w y (/j/) h. These vary relatively little across the continuum, but vowels are much less stable, and any unique representation of them can be no more than a rough guide to the reader. Although some speakers consistently distinguish more vowels, and others fewer, many Guyanese use approximately the following system: two close front vowels, short and long, i ii; a short front mid-open and a long front mid-close vowel, e ee; short and long fully-open centralized vowels, a aa; a short back open or slightly centralized vowel, o; a long back mid-close vowel, oo; two close back vowels, short and long, u uu; three diphthongs, ai au ea.
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e. na wan baks di man tiif? 'Wasn't it a box (that) the man stole?' f. *na wan baks di man tiif wan baks? Like stative verbs, 'adjectives' take the past marker bin to denote simple past, not (as with non-statives) 'past before past'; and zero marker to denote non-past, not (as with non-statives) simple past. Many reject altogether the continuative marker a, and the few that accept it alter their meaning accordingly: (4) a. i bin get gon 'He had a gun.' b. di weda bin difren 'The weather was different.' c. i se dem blak piipl bin stap i kyar 'He said those black people had stopped his car.' d. mi no 'I know.' e. mi wiiri 'I am tired.' f. mi waak 'I walked.' g. wen rais yala, i redifi kot 'When the rice is yellow, it's ready to cut.' h. *wen rais yala, i a redi fi kot. i. *wen rais yala, mi a no i redi *'When the rice is yellow, I am knowing it is ready.' wen rais yala, yu a redi fi kot 'When the rice is yellow, you GET j. ready to cut.' 4.2. The remaining functions of English be are distributed between two verbs, a and de (cf. B. Bailey 1966:32-3). Each has, in Guyana, more functions than Bailey indicates for Jamaica; the principal ones are as follows. (a) Equative, linking co-referential but formally non-identical NP's: (5) a. da a fos yia mi staat 'That was the first year I started.' b. abi a lil bai an lil gyal 'We were little boys and girls.' (b) Introducing cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences: (6) a. a di seem ting hapn in ada vilij 'It was the same thing that happened in other villages.' b. a so abi yuus tu duu lang taim 'That was how we used to do it in the old days.' (c) 4Introducingimpersonal expressions: (7) a. if a tuutrii ayu 'if there are two or three of you.' b. evri sekan a sooja in a vilij 'There were soldiers in the village the whole time.' (d) Locative, with adverbials of place: (8) a. dem daadi de bitwiin dem kuli 'Their father was (living) among those East Indians.' b. abi de a striit 'We were in the street.' (e) Existential (in 'exposed position'): (9) a. dem wilinfi work bot ook na de 'They are willing to work but work doesn't exist.' b. laik hau yu daadi de 'just as your father was.'
650
(f) Introducing non-finites: (10) a. notn moo na de fi duu 'There's nothing else left to do.' b. mi de a luk mi kau 'I was (there) looking for my cow.' (g) Introducing adverbials of time or manner: (11) a. abi de til maanin 'We were (there) until morning.' b. abi de jes seemweso 'We stayed just like that.' Sometimes, of course, there are alternative possibilities-e.g. impersonal expressions with gat for type (c)-but a and de will not commute in any of the sentences cited, nor (at least in the basilect) can either be replaced by zero. (The mesolect is another matter, as we shall see.) We may sum up by saying that the area covered in English by a single verb which inflects for tense, number, and person is covered in basilectal creole by three distinct verbs (more, if you count items like redi, frekn, eebl etc.), none of which inflect. If we consider these facts simply as a learning problem for the basilectal speaker, and compare it with the problem which confronts, say, the English learner of French (i.e. replacing one all-purpose inflecting verb with another) or even of Spanish (i.e. replacing one inflecting verb with two which inflect rather more fully), we may better understand the difficulties which confront both learners and teachers of language in Guyana and indeed throughout the Anglophonic Caribbean. 4.3. In addition to the two tendencies discussed in ?2.5, we must now consider a third, which was dealt with in Bickerton 1971: the tendency to subcategorize by grammatical environment. As has been constantly emphasized by C.-J. Bailey, rule changes never extend immediately to all environments; they begin in a very limited area, which they normally saturate before they begin in the next area, and so on. In my earlier paper, I showed that, in at least one (predominantlybasilectal) community, the subcategories relevant to the introduction of the rulefu -- tu were (a) after yuus, (b) after modals and inceptives, (c) after desiderative and other 'psychological' verbs, and (d) in all other environments of fu as complementizer; and I showed that, for almost every speaker, the rule change had to be fully complete within one subcategory before it could extend to the next. For the copulative subsystem, the relevant subcategories seem to be precisely those examined in ??4.1-4.2. In addition, and for purposes of comparison, I have included a subcategory which is not really a part of the subsystem, but which in most treatments is lumped in with it, i.e. be as auxiliary with -ing. We may say (if an anthropomorphic metaphor may be excused) that the language change process operates by (a) dividing a given language area into environmental subcategories; (b) sequentially, within each subcategory, selecting a particular aspect of the 'target' or acrolectal rule; and (c) sequentially, within each category, making the minimal adjustment necessary to the speaker's grammarto incorporate the selection of (b). This is not just a theoretical model; in the analysis of Table 2 which follows, I shall show precisely how the process works in practice. 4.4. Table 2 shows the distribution of copula and quasi-copula forms for Bushlot by individual speaker. As Bushlot is a predominantly basilectal area, the mesolect is grossly under-represented; Figure lc, below, should help to explain why this is so, and Table 3 gives a rather fuller picture of the mesolect. However,

SPEAKER
651
8
23. 16. 7. 20. 24.

26.
1 1 1 1
1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1
2.
9.
1
1
1 1
1
1 1
25. 4. 12. 14.

6.
1 1 1
1
21.
10.
1
1 1
28. 3. 5. 27.
15.
1 1 1
1 1
1
1 1 1
1
1 2 13
13
1 3 3
23 3 ( )3 3
17. 1. 13.
11.
1 1 1 13 3
3 3 3 4
18. 19.
)3 3 4
Key: 1 = de/bin de in Cols. 1-4; a/bina in Cols. 5, 7, 8; 0/bin in Col. 6. 2 = 0 except in Col. 6. 3 = iz/woz (no person concord). 4 = be with full person concord. Environments: Col. 1 - locative; Col. 2 = existential; Col. 3 = time/maner adverbials; Col. 4 = preceding non-finite structures; Col. 5 = cleft S's; Col. 6 = pred. adj.; Col. 7 = NP complement; Col. 8 = impersonal S's; Col. 9 = V-ing. Scalability = 95.6%.
TABLE 2. Implicational table for copula distribution (Bushlot).
the change process itself develops in accord with the tendencies discussed in ?2.5. 'Partial selection' begins by noting that some of the items in the speaker's repertoire are non-standard, and 'least effort' responds by dropping them without always replacing them (2 in Table 2). This development is much clearer and more widespread in Table 3; later, I shall try to show why. Next, 'partial selection' observes the appropriate verb iz and its appropriate past tense woz, while 'least effort' incorporates them, without at this stage making any changes in the underlying grammar (e.g. cleft and impersonal sentences still do not acquire it or there) or adopting number inflections (4 in Table 2). Finally, although the data of Table 2 are inconclusive on this score, it seems likely from other evidence that the full set of English inflections is not introduced until (perhaps some time after) iz/woz has taken over all environments; and that, once it is introduced, it extends to all subcategories simultaneously. This might seem to contradict the tendency toward environmental subcategorization, but in fact it does not; once the same verb has occupied all subcategories, there is no longer reason to suppose that they
652
SPEAKER

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
120. 126. 129. 118. 121. 101. 100.
1 1 1 1
1
1 1 1
1 1
1 1 2 2 2 2 23 23
l4 1 2
3 3 2 2
99. 119. 125. 108. 105. 123. 102.
1 _ 23 23 3 3 3 3 3 2
23 3 3 3 3 3 3
3 3 3 3 3
2 3 3 3 3 23 23 3 3
23 ( 23 23 3
@
117. 124. 122.
3 3
3 3
Q 3
3 3 3
3 3
3 3
3 3 3 3
TABLE 3. Copula distribution: the mesolectal pattern. 1 = a; de. 2 = 0. 3 = be (all forms). Col. 1 = locative; Col. 2 = existential; Col. 3 = non-finites; Col. 4 = NP complement; Col. 5 = cleft S's; Col. 6 = impersonal; Col. 7 = -ing; Col. 8 = pred adj. Scalability = 87.90%. Note (a) absence of time/manner, (b) reversal of NP complement and cleft S.
would go on being perceived as separate. I should also add that these are not the only stages in the process, but merely the most important ones. Others which we may briefly note are: (i) 'Premature' sandhi. This stage comes between 4 and 5 and gives rise to sentences such as: (12) a. aiz yu daadi, tshail 'I'm your father, child.' b. yuuz a kyaapinta, nu? 'You're a carpenter, aren't you?' (These must not be confused with apparently similar forms, e.g. aiz go de regla 'I go there regularly', where aiz represents ai doz, doz being the mesolectal habitual-aspect marker.) (ii) Random distribution of number inflections. This is an early substage of 5, and yields forms such as i wor, wii woz etc. (iii) Acquisition of English sandhi (isn't, aren't etc.) This is the final stage of all; it is, I suspect, often delayed because many local teachers still stigmatize these forms as incorrect. 4.5. Some details of Table 2 are worth comment. First, the upper half of Col. 9 is empty because, in the basilect, the ing form itself is not present. The basilectal translation of he (is) walking is i a waak-but a+stem is much more than a mere equivalent of the English present continuous, and I did not wish, in this paper, to embroil the reader in the Guyanese verbal system as a whole; hence I have deliberately ignored the possible but, I think, doubtful identity of equative with continuative/iterative a, and therefore have excluded occurrences of the latter from the table. A second point of some theoretical interest concerns the fact that, within the pattern of subcategorization already described, a is eliminated before
653
change is introduced into any of the subcategories of de. The same is true of Table 3, and it would be nice to think that one had uncovered a universal process; unfortunately, a third sample, drawn from Uitvlugt in West Demerara, while retaining all the other features discussed here, retains some subcategories of both a and de after others have been eliminated. It is beyond the scope of this paper to describe or try to account for differential rule ordering among different regional or social groups; this must remain a topic for future research. 4.6. While Table 2 is predominantly basilectal, Table 3 is predominantly mesolectal. Data for it were obtained by taking all speakers with survey numbers between 99 and 130 who used copula forms in not less than three different environments. (It should be emphasized that survey numbers represent only the order in which transcribed texts were incorporated into the body of the corpus; this particular span of numbers includes recordings by five different individuals made under a variety of circumstances. Speakers, some African, some Indian, are drawn from all three counties and all class levels from 'middle-middle' on down.) Despite some variety in the nature of texts, no allowances were made for contextual, sytlistic, or other differences. There is one slight variation from the practice of Table 2; since one of the main purposes of Table 3 is to illustrate the spread of zero in the mesolect, the index 2 has been given to all occurrences of zero, whether as basilectal PA-copula or mesolectal copula-replacement, and the table has been further simplified by lumping together inflected and uninflected be (index 3, bin, did not occur in this set of data). Scalability is lower than in Table 2-this seems universal for the mesolect, for reasons to be discussed-but still adequate at 87.90 %. While post-hoc explanations must always be suspect, it is worth noting that 30 % of the deviance (removal of which would raise scalability to more than 90 %) stems from a single speaker, 123. This was one of my assistants (the only one in the sample under discussion), recorded while himself in conversation with informants; his own norm is quasi-acrolectal (he was a finalyear English major at the time), and when working he used the somewhat risky procedure of attempting an idealized mesolect so as not to 'contaminate' informants with acrolectal forms. 4.7. For all the frequency of zero, there are three columns in which it does not, and perhaps cannot, occur. It cannot occur in Col. 2 because the item to be replaced, existential de, has semantic meaning, stress, and clause-final position. Indeed, as compared with be, de carries stress in all environments:
2 1
(13) a. i dein di kobod.

3
3 1
b. It is in the cupboard. (14) a. mi de (unmarked; answer to waapnin? 'How are you?')

1 3
b. I am (unmarked; answer to 'Who's the eldest?') In locative environments, such as 13, the secondary stress carried by de can readily be transferred to another item when zero substitutes; but this is hardly possible where, as in 14 and with existential de generally, the verb occurs in environment #.
654
Nor can zero very well occur in Col. 5, since the simple deletion of a would merely neutralize the opposition between pairs of sentences such as: (15) a. a mi hozbantel mi 'It was my husband who told me.' b. mi hozbantel me 'My husband told me.' Thus a must be replaced immediately by some formative. Usually, 'partial selection' and 'least effort' ensure that unlinflectediz should be that formative, even when, as in two of the next three examples, context seems to call unequivocally for some past-tense marker: (16) a. if iz midnait i weeki gon bigin kos 'If it's midnight when he wakes up, he'll start swearing.' b. iz afta da di waata staat iitin 'It was after that that erosion set in.' c. iz yiaz afta de bil a maakit 'It was years later that a market was built.' I suspect that the reason for this may go something as follows. There is evidence for a rule, which might even apply to creoles in general (cf. Bickerton & Escalante 1970:258), whereby aspect markers are deleted in all but the deepest S of any derivation; this, in turn, may be only a special case of a far more general output constraint which would permit only one marker of aspect, tense, plurality etc. (but not, of course, of negation) for each derivation. Now, across the continuum almost to the acrolect (as in a number of African languages, e.g. Nupe-cf. Smith 1969:117) stem+0 indicates 'present state, past action'; staat and bil, in 16b-c, are therefore unequivocally marked 'past'. We have already noted that basilectal grammatical structures persist long after the characteristic basilectal morphemes have been replaced; on this basis, the last two sentences would be regarded as already sufficiently marked, and the addition of a past morpheme to iz would be felt as at least superfluous, perhaps ungrammatical (woz, of course, never occurs at all in present-tense contexts, so this situation cannot be compared with that of ?4.4, (ii)). In the third case, Col. 6, zero cannot occur because, in impersonal expressions, it or there are the items which originally have zero representation, and they are not introduced until a stage at which be is realized obligatorily in all environments; thus, while both 'subjectless' verb and impersonal-subject-plus-verb are possible, impersonal-subject-plus-zero and double-zero realization are not: (17) a. we iz madon nau woz a potagii man neem di freetas 'Where the Modern (Store) now is, there was a Portuguese called de Freitas.' b, wen di ool leedi dedwoz di torddeefu dis bai 'When the old lady died, it was three days after this boy was born.' c. *we iz madon nau a potagii man neem di freetas. d. *wen di ool leedi ded di torddeefu dis bai. e. we iz madon nau dee woz a potagii man neem di freetas. f. wen di ool leedi ded it woz di tord deefu dis bai. g. *we iz madon nau dee a potagii man neem di freetas. h. *wen di ool leedi ded it di tord dee fu dis bai. The fact that woz is always realized in past tense with impersonal expressions, as distinct from cleft sentences, is far from the disconfirmation of our previous
655
analysis that it might appear; on the contrary, since what we are dealing with here is the deepest S, that analysis would forecast the presence of the past morpheme, in sentences like those of 17. 4.8. In the columns where zero can occur, it does so with great frequency; of the 57 filled cells in those columns, 30, or 53 %, contain occurrences of zero-and, since the environments which those columns represent are more common than the others, its salience as a feature is even greater than this figure would indicate. We can now see one way in which the myth of the 'creole zero copula' may have come into existence. As pointed out in B. Bailey 1971, the texts in Le Page & DeCamp 1960 which led Taylor 1963 to dismiss Jamaican Creole as 'not a creole' were taken from the approximate center of the continuum; I suspect that, because of the social stigma attached to creoles generally, most non-creole-speaking linguists have had trouble in getting anything deeper than mesolectal texts. Moreover, until very recently, linguists were looking only for homogeneous systems. Their first move would probably be to dismiss as 'English interference' all occurrences of be. Their next move might be to rationalize away any genuinely basilectal markers that could have leaked into the sample; e.g., a (never stressed, and in some phonological environments assimilated) might simply not be heard-or, if heard, might be written off as a 'hesitation phenomenon' (Guyanese hesitationmarker am can sound quite similar) or other performance feature, or even be interpreted as a derivative of English are. Likewise, de could be treated as a phonological re-interpretation of English there (which it also is, of course!); thus i de would be read as i+0+de 'he (is) there', etc. Even apparent counter-examples such as i de de could always be accounted for by that good old creole standby, 'reduplication'-'he there there'! Thus it is by no means difficult, given the assumption that creoles are 'simplifications' of European languages, to confirm this assumption without doing excessive violence to the data. However, as we have now seen, this 'simplification'-if zero copula may be so termed-is a characteristic feature, not of the creole basilect, but of that process ofDECREOLIZATIONwhich produces the mesolect. One thing, however, is still not entirely clear: namely, why zero persists, if only sporadically, among the more acrolectal speakers of Table 3. Figure 1 is an attempt to suggest some reasons. Here the
UPPER CLASS
- --- _ _
URBAN CLASSES
- ----_
Lower limit of L2 English
A__/ ._LANG
<-
LANG
_\-Lower
limit
SA 'A'/
RURAL CLASSES / (INDIGENOUS (INDIGENOUS
'B'
LANGUAGES) LANGUAGES)
of Pidgin English
\
FIGURE la. L-model for 'plural' ex-colony (Ghana, Malaya, etc.) (Arrows indicate indigenous bilingualism).
656
LANGUAGE,
VOLUME 49, NUMBER
3 (1973)
UPPERCLASS
----MINGPT CLASS \ _-. ING CLASS
Various class 'dialects' of a unitary if non-homogeneous language.
ING CLASS
FIGURE lb. L-model for metropolitan
states (England, France, etc.).
situation in the typical post-colonial 'plural' society (la) and the culturally homogeneous metropolitan society (lb) are contrasted with the Guyanese situation (lc). It is a perhaps regrettable fact that the most important covariable of linguistic behavior in Guyana is not age, occupation, education, income, or even urbanization, but ethnic identity--i.e., whether the speaker belongs to the African or the East Indian community. All the Bushlot speakers are East Indians; most of the speakers of Table 3 are African. As a result of socio-economic forces operatACROLECT
A
scu
mt
I
Zone of maximum zero
c T
FIGURE Ic. L-model forGuyana. m = section of continuum occupied by Africans 1 = section of continuum occupied by Indians o = section of continuum formerly occupied by Africans (still semi-available tic effect).
for stylis-
657
ing in Guyana over the last century or so, the bulk of the African population has moved well away from the basilect, while much of the Indian population has not. But the mesolectal 'floor' of the African, as shown in Fig. lc, must not be regarded as impermeable. There are isolated individuals whose speech habitually lies below it; and also, since for most African speakers the basilect lies within passive knowledge,8 it is available to them, to rather varying degrees, for such stylistic effects as the telling of folktales, the signaling of emotions as diverse as intimacy and deprecation, the reporting of the speech of those they consider beneath themselves socially, and so on. From these facts, two conclusions follow. First, a very large proportion of the African population lies within that mesolectal zone in which frequency of zero as a replacement form is highest-and it seems likely that, the commoner a form is, the harder it is to discard. Second, the fact that zero is one of the few forms found in both mesolect and basilect would tend to reinforce its use, particularly in style shifting, as compared with that of items associated solely with one or other of the two. But doubtless other factors are involved, and-since it obviously has a bearing on the origins of 'copula deletion' in U.S. 'Black English'-the problem is one that merits further study.
THE GUYANESE PRONOMINAL SYSTEM
5.1. We may now turn to our second subsystem. Here, for reasons of space, I shall examine only singular pronouns, and I shall do so from a purely morphological viewpoint-though there appear to be some interesting differences within Guyanese speech relating both to the conditions under which pronominalization can take place and those under which pronouns may be deletable. The simplicity achieved at this price will be used to handle a larger mass of data than was possible in dealing with the rather trickier copula. 5.2. Not all pronouns are variable. Throughout the continuum, the 3sg. masculine subject pronoun is (h)i. The pre-aspirated form occurs even in the basilect under primary stress; its frequency in other environments increases as one crosses the continuum, but this change is of little theoretical interest as compared with the grosser changes we are considering here. Similarly, basilectal mi as lsg. object pronoun merely undergoes vowel lengthening in 'higher' lects;9 it should be clear that, unless phonetic differences are sharp enough (e.g. between mi and mai as deictic pronouns), not much reliance can be placed on them as indicators of linguistic change, because of the amount of phonetic variability present in all speech. Lengthening of the same kind is the only change to affect 2sg. yu. Other forms, while they do vary, are relatively rare, at least in the present corpus, and would therefore merely encumber the analysis with additional categories, without any compensating benefit: these include the entire possessive set, mine, yours etc. (basilect miwan, yu wan etc., mesolect mi oon, yu oon etc.) and 2nd and 3rd person possessives yu/
8 'Passive knowledge' seems to me in every way a preferable concept to 'competence'. Although comprehension and production are probably always asymmetrical, the idealist orientation of generative theory takes no cognizance of this. 9 Guyanese vowel length is highly variable at the best of times, and I know of no case where it is distinctive in word-final position.
658
yor, i/its. This leaves us with the following categories: (a) 1st person subject: mi/a/ai. (b) 1st person possessive: mi/mai. (c) 3rd person masc. object: am/i/im.'0 (d) 3rd person masc. possessive: i/iz. (e) 3rd person fer. subject: i/shi. (f) 3rd person fem. object: am/i/shi/or. (g) 3rd person fem. possessive: i/shi/or. (h) 3rd person neuter subject: i/it.11 (i) 3rd person neuter object: am/it. Several features of the system are worth noting. First, the number of variants (excluding purely allomorphic ones) ranges from one to four between categories. This already would render suspect any attempt to divide the continuum into three discrete systems, as might have been suggested by our informal use of the terms basilect, mesolect, acrolect (and as is actually proposed for the Hawaiian continuum by Tsuzaki 1970), since in some cases one form would have to be arbitrarily assigned to two systems, while in another (f), two forms would have to be assigned to one system. Second, the same form does not necessarily have the same status in each category. Thus i, a basilectal form in (d), (e), (g) and (h), is a first-replacement form in (c) and (f). Again, shi is a first-replacement form in both (e) and (g), but in the first it is not replaced, while in the second it is; and in (f), where it is also replaced, it is a second replacement. Third, there is nothing resembling a bi-uniqueness principle in the replacement process; basilectal i is replaced by three different forms, acrolectal it is the replacement for two. At first sight, the system might seem totally anarchic, but it is not really so. 5.3. Limiting ourselves for the moment to the 3rd person, we may begin by comparing some features of the polar lects, as follows:
BASILECT ACROLECT
Yes Yes Yes (except for neuter) Now if linguistic change proceeded according to the principles of logic, one would expect the existing similarity with regard to the third distinction to be maintained, while the previous two distinctions were being gradually introduced. But No No Yes
10It should be noted that i, im, iz, or have preaspirated allomorphs (i.e. 'true' allomorphs, not alternants within the continuum); these appear always under stress, and with increasing frequency in other environments as the acrolect is approached. But am and it have no such forms; and for this reason as well as others, it seems highly doubtful whether am has any kind of etymological connection with him. Them, another etymon sometimes claimed by amateurs, is even more improbable, since its Guyanese version dem seems never to contract-despite the fact that it does so in many regional or 'sub-standard' varieties of English. 1A very few Guyanese speakers have am-usually [Am]-as neuter subject. None appeared in the sample under analysis, and thus it is unclear how this feature would fit into the evolution of the pronominal system.
1. Gender distinction 2. Subject/possessive distinction 3. Subject/object distinction
659
in fact, change operates on the three tendencies already laid down. The tendency of partial selection affects only one distinction, i.e. gender. The second distinction it ignores altogether until, in the immediate pre-acrolectal stage, other distinctions have been taken care of. The third it does not merely ignore, but overrides, generalizing remorselessly from category to category, until the basilect-acrolect similarity within the distinction has been totally erased, and the distinction pattern of the mesolect is: 1, Yes; 2, No; 3, No! At the same time, the principle of least effort is at work, carrying out the necessary changes with the minimum introduction of new forms: in the five moves which, as we shall see, are necessary to introduce the gender distinction throughout, only one basilectal form is discarded, and only two new forms are introduced into the system. At the beginning of the process, two forms suffice for the eight categories which must eventually utilize seven forms; at the end, when gender distinction is complete, there are still only three! Only then is the subject/object distinction restored, leaving the subject/possessive one till last. The process may be demonstrated by showing the system at each stage; the convention adopted is that the first group of three forms will represent, in every case, masculine, feminine, and neuter subjects in that order; the second group, masculine and feminine deictic; and the final group, masculine, feminine, and neuter object. Thus the basilect is: I. i i i / i i / am am am Gender differentiation takes place first in the feminine subject: II. i shi i / i i / am am am -and then in the neuter object: III. i shi i / i i / am am it At this stage gender differentiation is interrupted, as the change process 'recognizes' the salience of am. But am is salient because it is the only basilectal form in the system which is not perceived to be present in the acrolect (allowing for phonetic alteration as mentioned in ?5.2). It therefore becomes stigmatized; it always occurs, for instance, in imitations by Africans of rural Indians, even though many of the latter have wholly or partially abandoned it. But the principle of least effort ensures (a) that replacement will precede rather than accompany gender differentiation, and (b) that a form already in the system will constitute the replacement. The system is now: IV. i shi i / i i / i i it Gender differentiation of the object is then completed by transference of another existing form from the subject class: V. i shi i / i i / i shi it Next it is completed in the deictic by further transference of the same form: VI. i shi i / i shi / i shi it It is then completed in the subject by transferring an existing form from the object: VII. i shi it / i shi / i shi it
660
At this stage, the system attains a kind of homeostasis; changes proceed in other persons, while the third remains unchanged over several isolects. Finally, when a point on the continuum has been reached sufficiently close to the acrolect for the non-standardness of pronoun distribution to be perceived, final replacement takes effect, first by object differentiation restoring the original subject/object distinction: shi / im or it -and finally by possessive differentiation introducing the subject/possessive distinction: IX. i shi it / iz or / im or it It is possible that for some speakers, these last two stages are still further compartmentalized. 5.4. These changes are in no sense part of some idealized or schematic model; they constitute a precise record of what happens in the developmental process, and can be fully substantiated by the raw data summarized in Tables 4 and 5. The latter, which subsumes the most data, also affords the most precise parallels. In it, isolect A corresponds to stage I, C to II, D to III, E to IV, F to V, G to VI,
SPEAKER 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
VIII. i
shi it /
23.
16. 7. 20. 24. 9. 25. 14. 10. 28. 12. 6. 17. 13. 26. 2. 21. 15.
1 1 1 1 1 1_ 1 1 1 1 1 11 1 1 1 1
1
1 1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 12 12 12
I 1
5.
11.
27.
1
1
3
1
1
3
12
1. 19.
23
2 2
TABLE4. Singular-pronoun distribution (Bushlot). Col. 1 = 1st pers. poss. (1 = mi); Col. 2 = 3rd pers. masc. poss. (1 = i); Col. 3 = 3rd pers. neut. subj. (1 = i, 2 = it); Col. 4 1st pers. subj. (1 = mi, 2 = a, 3 = ai), Col. 5 = 3rd pers. masc. obj. (1 = am, 2 = i); Col. 6 = 3rd pers. fem. poss. (1 = i, 2 = shi); Col. 7 = 3rd pers. fem. obj. (3 = shi); Col. 8 = 3rd pers. neut. obj. (1 = am, 2 = it). Scalability = 100%.

ISOLECT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
661
9
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N 0 P Q R S T U
1 11 1 I 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 23 33 23 23 23 23 23 23 23 23 3
1 1 1
1 1 1 3 2 C
1 1 1 j 2
1 12 112 |2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 a
1 2
1
1
3
3 23
1 2 2 2 2 2 2
22 2 2 ) 2
~~~J~~~~~~~~~_3
12 1
J
2 ) 2 2 2
12 12 12 12 2 2 2 2
)
2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 23 3 ( 3
2
4
TABLE 5. Singular-pronoun distribution for 59 speakers. Lects: A = 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 24, 25, 28, 118, 120, 129, 135, 140, 142; B = 126; C = 119, 134, 136, 137; D = 2, 15, 21, 26; E = 99, 27; F = 11, 148; G = 149, 152;H = 5, 139, 146;I = 104, 144;J = 141;K = 1, 121; L = 114;M = 156;N = 125; 0 = 19, 100; P = 107; Q = 105; R = 108; S - 117; T = 102, 111,113, 122; U = 103,
106, 107, 124.

Cols: 1 = 3MPos (1 = i, 2 = iz); 2 = lPos (1 = mi, 2 = mai); 3 = ISub (1 = mi, 2 3FPos (1 = i, 2 = shi); 6 = 3MObj a, 3 = ai); 4 = 3NSub (1 = i, 2 = it); 5 (1 = am, 2 = i, 3 = im); 7 = 3FObj (1 = am, 2 = i, 3 = shi, 4 = or); 8 = 3NObj (1 =
am, 2 = it); 9 = 3FSub (1 = i, 2 = shi). Scalability = 88.03%. 99 and 125 represent the same speaker; see fn. 13.
H to VII, P to VIII, and Q to IX. It is possible-indeed likely--that for some individuals or groups the stages are re-ordered, but such re-orderingis likely to be minimal (e.g. a reversal of the ordering of immediately adjacent stages); and neither the identity of the stages nor the over-all process appear to be disturbed in any part of the total population of Guyana. Table 4 follows the pattern of Table 2 in that the mesolect is again under-represented. Moreover, it is defective in that exposition and narrative (as opposed to conversation) do not encourage
such a wide range of pronouns; there are no female subject pronouns in the sam-
ple, and female objects occur only for one speaker. Granted these limitations, the material is even more regular than that of Table 2. Well over half the speakers appear purely basilectal; and we may be the more sure of this since the commonest category, neuter object, is normally only the second in which replacement of basilectal items occurs-moreover, scalability is 100 %. But the evidence of Table 5 is by far the most impressive so far encountered. It illustrates the performance of no less than 59 speakers-the 23 speakers of Table 4 plus 36 others, obtained by taking all speakers with survey numbers between 99 and 160 who
662
used pronouns in at least three of the nine relevant categories. As a result of the latter stipulation, 75 % of the possible cells are filled-showing that, in this table at least, the consistency of the data can in no way be attributed to their paucity. Indeed, the table draws on a section of the corpus amounting to between fifty and sixty thousand words-enough language to fill a fair-sized novel-and reduces to schematic form a total of well over two thousand pronoun tokens. Moreover, the data are as crude as they come-all raa taak, to use one informant's telling phrase. Although recorder, informant's awareness, context of situation, style, mode of discourse, ethnic identity, geographic location, age, sex, occupation, education, and income of informant, as well as other factors, were all variables, no editing or selection of any kind was undertaken, with one exception: material known to be direct quotation from some song, proverb, kwekwe formula, or similar set text was excluded from the analysis (a typical example of such quotation, with accompanying context-which, incidentally, shows a fair degree of sociolinguistic sophistication-is given in an appendix to this paper). Otherwise, even where there was both internal and external evidence of a style change on the part of the speaker, no excisions were made. Yet despite this, and despite the fact that the conflation of speakers with similar lects (necessary to reduce the table to manageable size) reduces the number of filled cells by almost half, while barely affecting the deviations, scalability still reaches 88.03 %; and it is all downward scalability, with the exception of lect E. If the two highly deviant speakers who occupy this lect were removed, downward-only scalability would be only a few points below 90 %.Who are they? Readers of Bickerton 1971 will not be surprisedto learn that one of them is none other than that mauvais sujet parlant, speaker 27.12The other is a character every bit as deviant. Speaker 99 is a cane-cutter, African, with primary education only; he has an Indian wife, which is unusual, and he has much closer relationships with his Indian neighbors than do most Africans-in particular, he is involved in some bizarre kind of love-hate relationship with an alcoholic who was once acquitted on a murder charge. He has an extremely shrewd, if untrained and rather paranoid intelligence, is very active in trade-union (MPCA) affairs at branch level, and has a lively left-activist's contempt for both sugar-estate management and official union leadership. The poles of his discourse may fairly be represented by the following brief extracts: (18) a. az i sii blod i doz get ai ton an a tel i wen yu wiidin mosn ool gras an faia tshap 'Whenever she (his wife) sees blood, she feels dizzy, and I told her that when she's weeding she mustn't hold on to the grass while she cuts it.' b. i tool mi dee wod nat giv wookaz alauans fu saikl dat i wod sii wi get transpoteeshanso da gud inof.
12Labov (personal communication) very properly queries the validity of post-hoc explanations such as these. My main justification is the hope that they will eventually form a basis for prediction. Ideally, one would like to be able to go over a list of such thumbnail sketches BEFOREhearing the tapes, and say, e.g., 'G, K, and 0 will probably be aberrant speakers.' This seems by no means an impossible goal.
663
The latter is a nice example of how trade-union activity serves as a vector of acrolectal forms, especially nominalizations.13 5.5. Again, a number of details in Table 5 are worth noting. The area in which change is initiated earliest (female subject, Col. 9) is also that most subject to relapses. It contains no less than five reversions to i; yet in the three columns for which am is the basilectal form (6, 7, 8), only a single reversion to am occurs. Why is this? The earlier deviances in Col. 9 are probably caused by a re-ordering of rules, which for some speakers would wholly or partially eliminate am before fully introducing shi. We may well suppose that am so seldom re-appears precisely because it is heavily stigmatized. But i, on the other hand, is like zero, spanning even more of the continuum, spreading rather than contracting in both frequency and functions as the central isolects of the continuum are reached. It is hardly surprising that it should continue to influence even those areas in which it has already been replaced. Indeed, it is responsible for no less than 13 of the 17 deviances in the table. And of course it should be born in mind that most of the lower deviances, perhaps all (one must say 'perhaps', since often the only 'hard' evidence for a style shift consists of the forms themselves), arise through changes in style or topic, or associated changes in both. E.g., the lowest relapse in Col. 9, that of speaker 100, occurred when he was describing the kwekweceremony held to celebrate his wedding when he was a young man (he is now in his fifties). He was concerned to explain to his interlocutor how this ceremony had brought him into contact with levels of rural cultural creolization of which he, a lifelong resident of Albuoystown (a tough working-class district of Georgetown) had no personal knowledge till then; and in his description he reverted (probably quite unconsciously) to the linguistic norms of his country grandparents. Another point to note is the variable duration of rule conflicts. Some are resolved so quickly that they do not show up in the table at all; others extend across several isolects. The longest concern 1st person pronouns, and it is precisely these (a/ai, mi/mai) which are phonetically most similar: for some speakers at least, the a/ai distinction is little more than a function of the difference between fast and slow speech, and the fact that the two items enter simultaneously arises through the use of ai (like the pre-aspirated 3rd person forms) as a carrier of stress, even before mi has been definitively abandoned. 5.6. The significance of Table 5 becomes still clearer if we compare it with Table 6 and Figure 2. Table 6 is a panlectal grid for the area under consideration; that is, it contains all possible isolects for that area, given A and U as terminal
13As noted under Table 5, 99 and 125 represent the output of a single speaker; cf. Tables 3 and 5. (I hasten to add that no other speaker is duplicated in any of the samples analysed here.) The difference in his behavior is no fluke: though on both occasions he was recorded surreptitiously, as 99 this was done by a member of his family alone, and as 125 by myself in the company of the same family member. In other sections of the corpus, excluded here, I have similar duplications, and these will form the subject of future studies. It should be clear that the panlectal grid gives us an invariant background against which the true nature and extent of switching phenomena can be studied with a precision never before possible.
664
ISOLECT

4
EQVALEN EQUIVALENTS
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 12 12 12 12 12 2 2 2
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 2 2
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 12 123 123 23 23 23 23 23 23 23 23 3
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 12 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 12 12 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
1 1 1 1 1 1 12 12 12 12 12 12 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 23 3 3 3 3 3 3
1 1 1 1 12 2 2 23 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 34 4 4 4 4
1 1 1
12 12 12
1 12 2
2 2 2
A B C
-
12
12
2
2
D, E
-
12
12
2
2
F
-
2
2
2
2
G
-
2
2
2
2
2 2
2
2 2
2
H I
-
2 2
2
2 2
2
J, K, L M
-
2
2 2
2
2 2
N,O
-
2
2
2
2
P,Q
2 2
2 2
R, S, T U
TABLE6. Panlectal grid for Guyanese singular pronouns. Columns and indices as in Table 5. Note: A complete panlectal grid for this area would have to include two more lects to accommodate the change from shi to or in Col. 5. Our data gave no information on this change, but we may conjecture it would fall between lects 20-25 (cf. ? 5.3 above).
isolects. If we superimpose a table of realized isolects on a panlectal grid (in this case, 5 on 6), we can see how many of the possibles are realized and how many areleft blank; we can also see how smooth the distribution of realizedisolects is, i.e. whether there is anything that might be called a 'structural gap'. Obviously, for this purpose, the few deviations will be ignored. The equivalences given on the right of Table 6 show that more than half the possible isolects are realized, and that realized isolects are fairly evenly distributed-the widest gap is of three isolects only. This indicates that the term 'continuum' is no mere figure of speech. Fig. 2 gives the distribution of speakers across the continuum in the shape of a histogram. The high numbers at either end make it appear at first sight as if the mesolect is relatively underpopulated; in fact, if we regard acrolect and basilect as no more than the two terminal isolects, their combined population is only 23 against a mesolectal total of 36. Thus, if our sample is anything like representative-and in fact it is probably biased in the direction of the basilect by the inclusion of too many lower-class rural speakers-more than 60 % of the over-all population would fall within the mesolectal area.

No. OF SPEAKERS 19 18 17
665
16 15 14 13 12 11 10
9
8
7
6 5 4 3 2
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
ISOLECTS FIGURE 2. Distribution of speakers on the continuum (based on Table 6). DISCUSSION
6.1. The foregoing analysis raises many new questions, one of the most interesting of which is: do the implicational relations that hold wIThIN subsystems hold equally BETWEEN them? The two most readily comparable tables are 2 and 4. Co-efficient of rank correlation, however, is only 0.59 {p = 1 - [6d2/N(N2 1)]}. Nine speakers occupied the basilect in both subsystems, against eight who occupied it only in one. In the whole sample, only ten speakers occupied similar isolects'4 in the two tables as against thirteen who did not. Nor was there, among these thirteen, any consistent trend. Six occupied isolects in Table 2 which were more creolized than those occupied in Table 4; seven occupied isolects in Table 4 more creolized than those occupied in Table 2. The inference which might be drawn from DeCamp 1971, that one can build implicational scales with any
14That is to say, isolects of equivalent distance from the polar ones.
666
random selection of features, does not seem to be borne out by the Guyanese evidence. Yet there AREimplicational relations which hold across different subsystems, and which may at times be more crucial than those which hold within them. E.g., the critical factor in the timing of a/ai appearance may be the dropping of a, both as continuative marker and equative verb, for there is an absolute restriction on their co-occurrence: (19) a. mi a wan gud romi 'I'm a heavy drinker.' b. *a a wan gud romi. c. mi a wok abak 'I'm working further inland.' d. *a a wok abak. The same would apply to the basilectal negator na in similar contexts. Indeed, it is probably as wrong to look for correspondences between complete subsystems as it is to seek them in random items. Probably there are quite complex chain reactions, zigzagging from subsystem to subsystem and back, like the strings of firecrackers lit outside Latin-American churches on feast days. The patterns will be found, given time, patience, and knowledge of the principles on which they are based. 6.2. Unlike most studies of variation (e.g. Labov 1966, Wolfram 1969 etc.), this paper makes no attempt either to quantify the relative distribution of competing variants, or to establish covariation between them and extralinguistic factors. However, no disparagement of such approaches is intended; I merely wished to show that the mechanics of variation (as distinct, of course, from its social uses!) can be accounted for in purely linguistic terms. Moreover, there is reason to believe that too sociological an approach to language can sometimes distort data.'6 For example, let us see what would have happened if we had dealt with the speakers of Table 5 in terms of socio-economic groups rather than as individuals. If we divided them into four groups on the basis of income, education, and occupation (corresponding roughly to middle, lower-middle, upperworking, and lower-working classes), then pronoun distribution for those groups would be as shown in Table 7. In Table 5, which showed the behavior of individuals, only 38 filled cells of 141 (26.95%) were split; in other words, nearly three-quarters of the data was invariant. In Table 7, 35 of 36 cells (97%) are split! An investigator working on group lines would have been driven to assume that variation was a near-universal characteristic of the continuum, and that classes differed only by the percentage of a given variable. He would then, doubtless, have begun to look for 'variable rules' which would account for these varying percentages, and the types of dynamic relationship which this paper has demonstrated would have escaped him completely. Of course it could be argued that a heterogeneous corpus as described in ?? 3.1 and 5.4 does not lend itself to group analysis; such an argument would, it is true, set severe limitations on the apdo not wish to suggest that this has necessarily happened in other areas. While it is tempting to compare, for example, the Guyanese situation with the Black U.S. one, we probably do not yet know enough about either to make profitable comparisons. We should learn enough in the next few years, though, with the tools now at our disposal.
s1 I

CLASS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
667
9
IV III II I
(N (N (N (N
= = = =
29) 16) 7) 6)
12 12 12 12
12 12 12 12
123 123 123 123
12 12 12 12
12 12 2 12
123 123 12 123
123 1234 34 23
12 12 12 12
12 12 12 12
TABLE7. Pronoun distribution by class. Class IV = lower working; Class III = upper working; Class II = lower middle; Class I = middle. Columns and indices as in Table 5.
plicability of group methods, limitations obviously not shared by the methods demonstrated here. However, it must be emphasized that the panlectal grid is an abstract concept based on a totality of determined possibilities, which does not depend on the existence of any particular speaker or speakers; however speakers perform, they have to be located somewhere along it, and Table 6 showed that the existing distribution was as even as one could reasonably expect. Let us therefore assume the most favorable possible hypothesis, i.e. that the social groups relevant for analysis coincided precisely with sets of contiguous isolects. One may remark in passing that this is an optimum condition never likely to be met with in practice. However, even on this basis, and taking our classes as the populations of isolects A-E, F-M, N-S, TU (so as to give the closest numerical correspondence to our real-life social groups), our results would simply be those of Table 8: split cells would still amount to 57.57 % of the total filled cells. In other words, apparent variation would still be more than double that shown in Table 5. Indeed, it should be clear that, unless classes are coterminous with isolects, any class or group approach cannot but increase the apparent variation: isolects must be conflated, and each isolect is by definition distinct from its neighbors. The only solution, then, would be to assume a fourteen-class system for Guyana (or should it be twenty-one?)-and we would still have to find room somewhere for the upper-middle class!
CLASS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ECT
1 1 123 1 1 12 123 12 12 A-E (N = 30) 1 12 3 123 12 12 12 12 12 F-M (N = 14) 12 12 4 12 23 2 23 2 12 N-S (N = 6) 2 2 23 2 3 2 TU (N = 8) TABLE8. Pronoun distribution on optimum group hypothesis, i.e. that the population of social classes is identical with the population of contiguous isolects. (Columns and indices as in Table 5.) IV III II I
6.3. The foregoing treatment seems to me to settle the true nature of a creole continuum beyond any reasonable doubt. In a singularly prophetic passage, Le Page (1966:vi) wrote: 'The descriptive analyst freezes for a moment what is in fact a highly dynamic system, and describes it in static terms. The "quantum mechanics" era in linguistics has not yet arrived, but I believe that the study of Creole languages will help it forward.' He appreciated the fact that bisystemic description could be no more than a temporary stop-gap (vii): 'Until we have evolved descriptive techniques somewhat analogous to those of quantum mechanics, however, the best we can do is to describe the two ends of the linguistic
668
VOLUME NUMBER3 (1973) 49, LANGUAGE,
spectrum in a country like Jamaica and give some indication of the nature of the continuum in between.' But the era and the methods Le Page foresaw have now arrived, and creole studies have indeed played the part in their arrival that he predicted. The skeptic, however, while granting the application of a dynamic approach to creole continuums, may still be inclined to consider these situations as rare marginal anomalies-and this approach, in consequence, as severely limited in its applicability. Indeed, even creolists have provided support for such a position. Alleyne (1963:27) distinguishes 'this unique type of continuum existing in Jamaica' from those which 'can be represented geographically, i.e. horizontally over an area of land' (e.g. French regional dialects) or 'can be seen through time' (e.g. the evolution of French from Latin).16 In fact, a creole continuum can be represented in social, if not geographic, space-and if, as suggested in Bickerton 1971, the synchronic spectrum of Guyana today merely reflects a diachronic cut through two centuries of its history, it can be represeated in time also. In other words, dynamic theory claims that the three situations seen by Alleyne as distinct are in reality different aspects of the same situation; and that, in consequence, the same fundamental laws of linguistic change must apply to all three. It must therefore follow that the theory and methods set out above must be valid, not merely for the creole continuum, but for every language situation that is not wholly and indisputably homogeneouswhich in effect means every language situation. It is time for linguists in general to stop looking for static systems which have no objective existence, and accept the fact that language is an ongoing process, not a steady state. Only when they have done this will they be able to disentangle and account for its real patterns.
APPENDIX
ai giv yu a jook: dee woz a skuul tiitsha-yu noo dis gool rosh yiaz agoo-a skuul tiitsha yuus tu get twenti dalaz a mont, da iz di hedmasta ov a skuul. well, den, di gool rosh keem-evribadi roshin in di intiiria, an di skuul masta disaid, wel twenti dalaz an hi shal mek, he shall mek twenti dalaz a dee prabobli, an hi shal tek som a di moni-gool in dooz deez woz pikin it op so di skuul masta disaid tu mek di greed. wel in dooz deez yu yuus tu pul padl-wel yu gat tu sing a shanti tu pul. so you miit a faalz yu tai a roop an yu pul op an so an. so wen i go nau hi hiir di pooknaka singin, am: ooni las nait mi kom an dem tel lai pon mi, da mi gi gyal beli. wel hi iz a skuul masta, hi kaan see ooni las nait mi kom an dem kain a ting yu noo-da iz raa taak. wel hi kom wid, am: oonli las nait ai araiv an dee have spooken ontruuts abaut mii, dat ai hav got a gorl pregnant ... iz won lash in i hed! hi troo di baiz aut a tshuun, man! hi troo di baiz aut a tshuun, man, de put won padl in i, badam! (Material of the type italicized was discarded from the foregoing analysis; quotations of non-formulaic utterances, along with all other types of material, were included.)
16 It is only fair to Alleyne to point out that he no longer subscribes to the viewe quoted here; indeed, as I understand it, his present position is very similar to that expressed in the present paper.
THE NATURE OF A CREOLECONTINUUM REFERENCES
669
3:2.22-61. - . 1964. Review of Pompilus1961. Caribbean Studies4:3.51-4. formsin the dialectsof Englishused in Georgetown ALLSOPP,S. R. R. 1958.Pronominal (British Guiana) and its environs by people engaged in non-clericaloccupations. Universityof Londonmaster'sthesis. --. of 1962. Expressions state and action in the dialect of Englishused in the Georgetown area of British Guiana.Universityof Londondoctoralthesis. - . 1971.JamaicanCreole:can dialect boundaries defined?In Hymes, 341-8. be N. BAILEY, CHARLES-JAMES 1969-70. Studies in three-dimensional language theory I-IV. WorkingPapersin Linguistics,Universityof Hawaii, 1:8.105-38,2:4.109-25, 2:8.1-4. -- . 1970. Using data variationto confirm,ratherthan undermine, validity of abthe stract syntactic structures.WorkingPapers in Linguistics,University of Hawaii, 2:8.77-86. - . 1971.Tryingto talk in the new paradigm. University Working Papersin Linguistics, of Hawaii,4:2.312-39. of BICKERTON, DEREK. 1971. Inherentvariabilityand variablerules. Foundations Language 7.497-92. - , and A. ESCALANTE. Palenquero: Spanish-based 1970. a creole of NorthernColombia. Lingua24.254-67. Mass.: MIT Press. theory of syntax. Cambridge, 1971.Towardsa generativeanalysisof a post-creole DAVID. DECAMP, speechcontinuum. In Hymes, 349-70. and creolization languages.Cambridge: of UniHYMES,DELL(ed.) 1971. Pidginization versity Press.
LABOV, WILLIAM. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City. WshingCASSIDY, FREDERICKG. 1960. Jamaica 1965. Aspectsof the CHOMSKY, NOAM.
and C. Studies MERVYN 1963. Communication politicsin Jamaica.Caribbean ALLEYNE,
BERYL 1966. Jamaican Creole syntax. Cambridge: University Press. L. BAILEY,
talk. London: Macmillan.
ton, D.C.: Centerfor AppliedLinguistics. . 1969. Contraction,deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula. Lg. 45.715-62.
B. LE PAGE,ROBERT 1966. Preface to Bailey 1966.

MOUNIN, GEORGES. 1968. Saussure,ou
1960. JamaicanCreole.London:Macmillan. , and DAVI DECAMP. le structuralistesans le savoir. Paris: Editions

Seghers. de 'Am6rique Latine.
1961. La langue frangaise en Haiti. Paris: Institut des Hautes Etudes POMPILUS,PRADEL. Speech 9.48-58, 122-131. N. SMITH, V. 1969. The Nupe verb. African Language Studies 10.90-160. 1963. Review of Le Page & DeCamp 1960. Lg. 39.316-22. TAYLOR, DOUGLAS. TSUZAKI, STANLEY M. 1970. Co-existent systems in language variation: the case of Hawaiian English. Working Papers in Linguistics, University of Hawaii, 2:8.5-30. D. TURNER, LORENZO 1949. Africanisms in the Gullah dialect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. WOLFRAM, WALTERA. 1969. A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro speech. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. [Received 23 February 1972] 1934. The English dialect of Hawaii. American REINECKE, JOHN E., and A. TOKnIASA.

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THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

THE NATURE OF A CREOLECONTINUUM

VOLUME NUMBER3 (1973) LANGUAGE, 49,

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

THE NATURE OF A CREOLECONTINUUM

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

tu tu/fu tu tu tu/fu fu fu fu fu tu fu fu fu tu/fu tu/fu fu tu/fu tu fu fu fu fu fu fu tu/fu fu

No data fu tu tu tu/fu tu tu/fu fu fu

VOLUME 49, NUMBER

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

23. 16. 7. 20. 24.

25. 4. 12. 14.

TABLE 2. Implicational table for copula distribution (Bushlot).

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

120. 126. 129. 118. 121. 101. 100.

99. 119. 125. 108. 105. 123. 102.

117. 124. 122.

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

(13) a. i dein di kobod.

b. It is in the cupboard. (14) a. mi de (unmarked; answer to waapnin? 'How are you?')

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

THE NATURE OF A CREOLECONTINUUM

Lower limit of L2 English

VOLUME 49, NUMBER

----MINGPT CLASS \ _-. ING CLASS

Various class 'dialects' of a unitary if non-homogeneous language.

FIGURE lb. L-model for metropolitan

states (England, France, etc.).

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

1. Gender distinction 2. Subject/possessive distinction 3. Subject/object distinction

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

106, 107, 124.

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

THE NATURE OF A CREOLECONTINUUM

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 3 (1973)

THE NATURE OF A CREOLE CONTINUUM

123 123 123 123

123 123 12 123

VOLUME NUMBER3 (1973) 49, LANGUAGE,

THE NATURE OF A CREOLECONTINUUM REFERENCES

and C. Studies MERVYN 1963. Communication politicsin Jamaica.Caribbean ALLEYNE,

BERYL 1966. Jamaican Creole syntax. Cambridge: University Press. L. BAILEY,

talk. London: Macmillan.

B. LE PAGE,ROBERT 1966. Preface to Bailey 1966.

1960. JamaicanCreole.London:Macmillan. , and DAVI DECAMP. le structuralistesans le savoir. Paris: Editions

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