Verse Analysis and the Nature of Creole Discourse

Abstract

This research applies Verse Analysis to the study of creole languages seeking evidence to support the two principal theories: universalist and sub-stratist theories. Evidence is presented from Hawaii Creole English (HCE), Guyanese Creole, and Japanese. HCE manifests in discourse a possibly universal feature of patterning (i.e., hierarchical grammatico-semantic recurrence), which is shared by Guyanese Creole as well as Chinook Jargon and quite a few Native American languages. On the other hand, HCE also shows an idiosyncratic phenomenon of numbering (i.e., doublets, triplets, quadruplets, etc., in lines and verses), which appears to have been linguistically transferred from Japanese as a substratum. Linguistic data, sociohistorical facts, and a scenario of substratum transfer are presented. This research reinforces a hypothesis that both internal innate properties and external substratal factors need to be taken into account to explain the origin of creole discourse grammar.