Functional Categories in Three Atlantic Creoles: Saramaccan, Haitian and Papiamentu (Creole Language Library)

This book is about the functional categories of three Caribbean creoles: Saramaccan, Haitian Creole and Papiamentu with two specific goals. The first one is to evaluate the respective contribution of the source languages to the functional categories of these three creoles. The second is to evaluate the degree of similarity/dissimilarity of the functional categories across these creoles. This study is cast within the relabeling-based account of creole genesis. Several lexical items discussed in this book may fulfill more than one grammatical function thus raising the issue of multifuctionality. No such in-depth comparative work of these three creoles with their source languages and of the three creoles among themselves is available elsewhere in the literature. This book is addressed to linguists (including Master and PhD students) interested in syntactic categories and more specifically in functional categories, to creolists and to researchers interested in language contact. This chapter discusses the material presented in this book organized around the various themes announced in the Introduction, and it addresses questions and comments pertinent to the issues related to these themes. The first theme to be addressed is the question of the similarity between the subsystems of functional categories between the three creoles. The second theme relates to the processes at work in the formation of the functional categories of these three creoles. Relabeling, grammaticalization and leveling will be discussed in turn. A discussion of phenomena, such as restructuring and extension, resulting from some process(es) follows. Finally, a discussion on multifunctionality in creoles and the issue of polysemy versus monosemy ends the chapter