Doctoral thesis
OA Policy
English

The acquisition of Jamaican Creole: The emergence and transformation of early syntactic systems

DirectorsRizzi, Luigi
Defense date2015-06-23
Abstract

This study explores the early acquisition of Jamaican Creole (JC) syntax. There is a significant gap in linguistic research investigating the acquisition of creole languages which this research aims to repair. Six children, age ranging from 1;6 – 1;11, were recorded over an 18 month period. 60 minutes recordings were conducted every 10-15 days, thereby establishing the first longitudinal corpus of acquisition data in a creole language. The corpus was subjected to detailed analysis describing both target-consistent and target-inconsistent productions. The phenomena studied included the emergence of tense, aspectual and modal markers, null subjects, focalization, topicalization, interrogation and ‘typical creole features' such as verb serialization, double-negation, etc. The empirical findings provide evidence of early syntactic development and contribute to the on-going debate on Language Universals. This study will have a long-lasting contribution to the linguistic community as it provides an accessible corpus of natural production of JC early syntactic systems.

Keywords
  • Language acquisition
  • Creole language
  • Jamaican Creole
  • Syntax
Funding
  • Swiss National Science Foundation - The Acquisition of Jamaican Creole Syntax: A corpus-based study of early parameter setting
Citation (ISO format)
DE LISSER, Tamirand Nnena. The acquisition of Jamaican Creole: The emergence and transformation of early syntactic systems. Doctoral Thesis, 2015. doi: 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:74228
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First validation03/07/2015 17:15:00
Update time14/03/2023 23:28:53
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