The Syntax of Jamaican Creole: A cartographic perspective(127 Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today)

This book offers an in-depth study of the overall syntax of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole, the first since Bailey (1966). The author, a Jamaican linguist, meticulously examines distributional and interpretative properties of functional morphology in Jamaican Creole (JC) from a cartographic perspective (Cinque 1999, 2002; Rizzi 1997, 2004), thus exploring to what extent the grammar of JC provides morphological manifestations of an articulate IP, CP and DP. The data considered in this work offers new evidence in favour of these enriched structural analyses, and the instances where surface orders differ from the underlying functional skeleton are accounted for in terms of movement operations. This investigation of Jamaican syntax therefore allows us to conclude that the 'poor' inflectional morphology typical of Creole languages in general and of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole in particular does not correlate with poor structural architecture. Indeed the free morphemes discussed, as well as the word order considerations that indicate syntactic movement to designated projections, serve as arguments in favour of a rich underlying functional map.

Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements; 2. Preface: A tribute to Miss Lou (1919-2006); 3. Chapter 1. Introduction; 4. Chapter 2. IP - The articulation of inflection in Jamaican Creole; 5. Chapter 3. CP - The left periphery in Jamaican Creole; 6. Chapter 4. DP - JC nominals and their extended projection; 7. Chapter 5. General conclusion; 8. References; 9. Index of names; 10. Index of subjects

Review :
Durrleman's is one of the most thorough and enlightening descriptions of a creole to have been written, with important implications for general syntactic theory. This is a wonderful piece of work that nicely combines careful empirical study of Jamaican Creole and very sophisticated theoretical analysis. I warmly recommend it to anyone interested in language description and theorizing. In the first full-fledged cartographic study of a Creole Language, Stephanie Durrleman provides a rich and original analysis of the major syntactic configurations of Jamaican Creole, with important consequences for Creole studies and syntactic theory. This work by Stephanie Durrleman is exciting. It is the first work since the pioneering work of Beryl Bailey in 1966 to attempt a study of such a broad sweep of the syntax of Jamaican. The work is both ambitious in its scope and solid in the modern theoretical framework within which it is presented. This is a must read for all scholars and students of Caribbean Creoles. This work presents a very detailed description of Jamaican Creole morpho-syntax in terms of a theoretically-explicit model of functional structure in clauses and noun phrases. Tame-Durrleman's book is an excellent example of theoretically-driven empirical research and should be inspiring to students and researchers alike. Durrleman describes fine-grained word order asymmetries among the optional, closed-class adverbial, adnominal and adclausal modifiers of Jamaican English, and derives these rich patterns from a few simple, fixed templates of highly articulated phrase structure in the mode of Rizzi and Cinque. Data are carefully controlled against a backdrop of theoretical literature in the comparative syntax of other Caribbean languages as well as of Germanic, Romance, Hungarian, Semitic and Gbe. Numerous judgements of optionality, coocurrence restrictions and semantic scope interaction will prove indispensable in testing syntactic models for many years to come.