Antiguan Creole: Genesis and Variation

This thesis investigates Antiguan Creole (AC), including its socio-history and sociolinguistics. Besides, it is concerned with the central strands of research in creolistics: the diachronic that focuses on creole genesis and creole development, and the synchronic that emphasizes the status of creoles as linguistic systems in their own right. The research has been organized in three parts. The first part is preparatory and concerns theoretical and methodological issues. It begins with a review of the literature concerning creole genesis and the creole continuum and examines the hypotheses to be tested. Next, it is concerned with research techniques and presents the fieldwork methods employed. The second part considers the following areas: the language and its context. It outlines the historical circumstances that led to the emergence of AC and then turns to the sociolinguistic situation of present-day Antigua. Subsequently, it offers a phonological and grammatical description of AC. The third part deals with the linguistic analyses that have been applied in order to test the hypotheses. This part provides a linguistic analysis of three linguistic features of AC that have been soundly investigated in other creole languages: palatal gliding after velars, copula system and its variability, and preverbal markers and past-marking by verb inflection. Firstly, to examine palatal gliding, the study begins with a historical account and then offers a synchronic description of the variable use of the palatal/stop glide complex. Secondly, copular and attributive predication is investigated from a historical perspective followed by a synchronic analysis of copula variability in present affirmative contexts. Thirdly, the research looks at the origin of the system encoding tense, mood and aspect and gives a synchronic analysis of the variable use of past inflection. Finally, the thesis is concluded by relating the findings of the previous chapters to issues concerning creole genesis on the one hand, and issues describing the speech community and the validity of the creole continuum model on the other. It is hoped that the present study offers a sound description of AC in order to demonstrate that AC deserves as much linguistic attention as other better known Caribbean creole languages.