Creolization and Syntactic Change in New Guinea Tok Pisin

Abstract

This chapter presents creolization and syntactic change in New Guinea Tok Pisin. The literature on pidgin languages are somehow reduced with few or no grammatical categories and syntactic rules and little or no morphonemics. Pidgin languages are difficult to handle because the parent languages are more difficult to identify. The heterogeneity of the speech community is at least theoretically greater than that of most other communities. A language used in a multiplicity of social and communicative contexts and that carries much of the communicative load for numbers of speakers develops grammatical machinery appropriate to its needs. Innovations use lexical resources available in the language and have specialized them to fill a grammatical function. Traditionally, baimbai functions as an optional adverb indicating a general notion of futurity. At present, the unreduced form is extremely rare, which forms a very small percentage of the surface representations of bai for any speaker and does not appear at all in the speech of the native speakers.