The acquisition of Jamaican Creole: The emergence and transformation of early syntactic systems

Abstract

This study explores the early acquisition of Jamaican Creole (JC) syntax. There is a significant gap in linguistic research investigating the acquisition of creole languages which this research aims to repair. Six children, age ranging from 1;6 – 1;11, were recorded over an 18 month period. 60 minutes recordings were conducted every 10-15 days, thereby establishing the first longitudinal corpus of acquisition data in a creole language. The corpus was subjected to detailed analysis describing both target-consistent and target-inconsistent productions. The phenomena studied included the emergence of tense, aspectual and modal markers, null subjects, focalization, topicalization, interrogation and ‘typical creole features' such as verb serialization, double-negation, etc. The empirical findings provide evidence of early syntactic development and contribute to the on-going debate on Language Universals. This study will have a long-lasting contribution to the linguistic community as it provides an accessible corpus of natural production of JC early syntactic systems.