Reviewed by Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Tallinn University

The focus of this volume is the synchronic and diachronic interplay of structure and variation in contact languages. The contributors provide data from the creoles of Suriname, Chinook Jargon, Sri Lankan Malay, Yiddish, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Bahamian Creole English, Nigerian Pidgin, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese, Papiamentu, and Haitian Creole.

Jeff Good, in ‘The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan’, focuses on the phonetic manifestation of a phonological split between pitch accent and tone. ‘Tracing the origin of modality in the creoles of Suriname’, by Bettina Migge, examines the origin and development of two subsystems of modality. In ‘Modeling creole genesis: Headedness in morphology’, Tonjes Veenstra argues that it is impossible to derive all the properties of creoles from the properties of their source languages. In ‘The restructuring of tense/aspect systems in creole formation’, Donald Winford attempts to reconcile the superstratist and substratist views of creole formation, focusing on the emergence of tense and aspect systems. Marvin Kramer, in ‘The late transfer of serial verb constructions as stylistic variants in Saramaccan creole’, concentrates on verb serialization and argues that each type of serial verb construction is marked by being constrained (e.g. by semantics or tense marking).

Zvjezdana Vrzić, in ‘Syntactic properties of negation in Chinook Jargon, with a comparison to two source languages’, analyzes the syntactic features of sentential negation in Chinook Jargon and compares them with the features of Lower Chinook and Upper Chehalis. In ‘Sri Lankan Malay morphosyntax: Lankan or Malay?’, Peter Slomanson scrutinizes the convergence of Sri Lankan Malay towards the grammars of Muslim Tamil and colloquial Sinhala. Ian R. Smith and Scott Paauw, in ‘Sri Lankan Malay: Creole or convert?’, state that for Sri Lankan Malay, Tamil is the main source of tense, mood, and aspect. In ‘The advantages of a blockage-based etymological dictionary for proven or putative relexified languages: (Extrapolating from the Yiddish experience)’, Paul Wexler describes Yiddish as a mixed Slavic language.

Chris Collins, in ‘A fresh look at habitual be in AAVE’, explores the use of agentive be in informal American English. ‘Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English’, by Stephanie Hackert, provides a quantitative analysis of past inflection. In ‘Aspects of variation in educated Nigerian Pidgin: Verbal structures’, Dagmar Deuber investigates variation in tense and aspect marking, copula forms, and verbal negation. Fernanda L. Ferreira, in ‘A linguistic time-capsule: Plural /s/ reduction in Afro-Portuguese and Afro-Hispanic historical texts’, analyzes the pluralization patterns found in historical texts covering five centuries. In ‘The progressive in the spoken Papiamentu of Aruba’, Tara Sanchez studies the progressive morpheme, –ndo, using a variationist method. Finally, Mikael Parkvall, in ‘Was Haitian ever more like French?’, offers a new approach to research on Haitian structure.

This volume provides an excellent introduction to the complexities of creole studies.