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Syntactic Similarities Of Creoles
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STRUCTURAL SIMILARITIES IN SYNTAX OF CREOLES

Note these features are common in creoles, but do not necessarily apply to a given creole language in particular.
  • Movement rules: Subject Verb Object word order, with similar mechanisms for using word order to apply Focus to one of these constituents.

  • Articles: Definite Article applied to specific and identified noun phrase, Indefinite Article applied to specific and newly-asserted noun phrase, and zero for nonspecific noun phrase.

  • TMA (Tense-Modality-Aspect) verb systems.

  • distinction of realized and unrealized complements

  • relativization and subject-copying

  • negation

  • existential and possessive

  • copula

  • adjectives as verbs

  • questions

  • question words

  • passive equivalents



TMA VERB SYSTEM

The verb Conjugation is typically close to an ideal Tense - Modality - Aspect pattern. In this system, the absence or presence of auxiliary Verb s indicate tense (concurrent or anterior), modality (realis or irrealis) and aspect (punctual or progressive), and when present these auxiliaries occur in that order, and typically are based on similar meaning words in the pidgin or superstrate language. Thus anterior tense may be marked by words such as ''bin'' in English creoles (from ''been''), or ''té'' in French creoles (from ''été''), a future or subjunctive tense may be marked by ''go'' (from English ''go'') or ''al'' (from French ''aller''), and a non-punctual (non-stative) aspect by a word such as ''stei'' (from English ''stay'').

The above table demonstrates syntactic similarities of creole languages. Stative verbs are those that cannot form the Nonpunctual Aspect . According to Bickerton, all observed creole languages strictly follow a structure that has the anterior particle precede the irreal particle, and the irreal particle precede the nonpunctual particle, although in certain languages some compounded forms may be replaced by other constructions.


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