Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English
This paper presents a quantitative analysis of past inflection in urban Bahamian Creole English. The variable has held a prominent position in the study of African American Vernacular English and Caribbean creoles, but whereas phonological, grammatical, and social factors have received much attention in this context, the influence of style or discourse type has rarely been noted. I analyze the formal and functional properties of three types of oral narrative obtained in sociolinguistic interviews. All of them, personal narrative as well as folktale and ‘generic’ narrative, show considerably lower inflection rates compared to the ‘chat’ mode but do so for different reasons; this, in turn, has repercussions for cross-variety comparisons, as samples usually differ in terms of their composition with regard to discourse type.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Kjelsvik, Bjørghild
2022.
“I Have no Family”—Identity Constructions in an Asylum Interview. In
Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives,
► pp. 29 ff.

Hackert, Stephanie
2008.
Counting and coding the past: Circumscribing the variable context in quantitative analyses of past inflection.
Language Variation and Change 20:1
► pp. 127 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.