Last update:
9 February 2010
|
Urban Bahamian CreoleSystem and variation
2004. xiv, 256 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 4892 3 / EUR 105.00 978 1 58811 575 1 / USD 158.00
This volume, a detailed empirical study of the creole English spoken in the Bahamian capital, Nassau, contributes to our understanding of both urban creoles and tense-aspect marking in creoles. The first part traces the development of a creole in the Bahamas via socio-demographic data and outlines its current status and functions vis-à-vis the standard in politics, the media, and education. The linguistic chapters combine typological and variationist methods to describe exhaustively a comprehensive grammatical subsystem, past temporal reference, offering a discourse-based approach to such controversial categories as the preverbal past marker. The quantitative analysis of variable past inflection, finally, tests not only well-known constraints, such as stativity or social class, but also ethnographically determined ones, such as narrative type. Its results are relevant not only to the study of Caribbean English-lexifier creoles and related varieties, such as African American English, but also to variation and change in urban dialects generally.
Table of contents
“Bahamian now joins the handful of Creoles for which fully accountable, empirical studies of sociolinguistic variation exist. Hackert’s theoretical and typological framework is fully up-to-date, while she confirms and advances our understanding of Creole tense, aspect, and discourse genre. Her ethnographic knowledge of Nassau is considerable, and her writing respects and illuminates her speakers’ life experiences. An exemplary work, valuable to all creolists, sociolinguists, typologists and students of English varieties.”
Peter L Patrick, University of Essex
“Urban Bahamian Creole. System and Variation proves valuable, as it investigates a subject (urban creoles) and a creole (Bahamian Creole English) that have received limited attention in creole studies. This book provides a rich source of urban Bahamian Creole English data, while also offering typological and quantitative analyses that will facilitate future cross-linguistic investigations. This is an excellent book that builds on existing work in Bahamian Creole English, and by extension, fills important gaps in our knowledge of tense-aspect systems in grammatical, pragmatic and sociolinguistic contexts in other CEC's.”
“Stephanie Hackert's Urban Bahamian Creole (UBC) is the most thorough examination of Bahamian grammar to date.”
“Even though the volume's papers are exceedingly diverse in topic and approach, they all clearly demonstrate that contact linguistics has far transcended the merely descriptive - a crucial step of any field of research.”
Subject classification |
Linguistics