Roots of Creole structures : weighing the contribution of substrates and superstrates / edited by Susanne Michaelis.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Print version record.

Roots of Creole Structures; Editorial page; Title page; LCC data; Table of contents; The problem of multiple substrates; The superstrate is not always the lexifier; In praise of the cafeteria principle; Tense marking and inflectional morphology in Indo-Portuguese creoles; Vowel epenthesis and creole syllable structure; The origin of the Portuguese words in Saramaccan; Encoding path in Mauritian Creole and Bhojpuri; On the principled nature of the respective contributions of substrate and superstrate languages to a creole's lexicon; Valency patterns in Seychelles Creole.

This book reflects an ongoing shift in the study of contact languages: After a period of history-free universalism, it directs the attention to the individual historical circumstances under which the pidgin and creole languages arose. The contributions deal with different areas of language structure including phonology, morphology, and syntax, providing a wealth of structural and sociohistorical data that any comprehensive theory of contact languages will have to account for. Each of the papers provides a thorough description of a structural phenomenon against the background of the sociohistor.

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