Textual Evidence on the Nature of Early Barbadian Speech, 1676-1835

1994 (J. R. Rickford and J. S. Handler) “Textual Evidence on the Nature of Early Barbadian Speech, 1676-1835.” Journel of Pidgin and Creole Languages 9: 221-55.

On the evidence of textual attestations from 1676-1835, early Barbadian English is shown to have exhibited many more nonstandard features than is generally recognized. Such features, which are commonly, if not exclusively, found in pidgins and creoles, include vowel epenthesis, paragoge and initial s-deletion processes, creole tense-modality-aspect marking, copula absence, the use of invariant no as a preverbal negative and as an emphatic positive marker, the occurence of one as indefinite article, and a variety of  morphologically unmarked pronomial forms.

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