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A Concise Grammar of Guyanese Creole

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 A concise grammar of Guyanese Creole (Creolese). By Hubert Devonish
and Dahlia Thompson. Munich: Lincom Europa. 2010. Pp. 146. Softcover
58,60 EUR (approx. US $82.00). [To order, visit http://www.lincom-shop.
eu/]
Reviewed by Shondel Nero (New York University)

In this 144-page volume, part of Lincom Europa’s series ‘Languages of the World/
Materials’, Devonish & Thompson (D&T) offer a concise and comprehensive
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description of the grammar of Guyanese Creole (GC), commonly referred to as

Creolese by its speakers. Dating back to the mid-18th century, GC is the mass
vernacular of the approximately 750,000 inhabitants of Guyana, a former British
colony located on the northeastern coast of South America. D&T note in their
introduction that GC is an English-lexified Atlantic Creole, although the English
from which it draws the bulk of its vocabulary is not always used with the same
meaning as its English cognates. The phonology and morphosyntax of GC, how-
ever, are significantly different from English.
The language situation in Guyana is typically described by linguists as a ‘Creole
continuum’ with GC, the most conservative or basilectal variety, at one end, and
Standard Guyanese English (the acrolect) at the other end, with intermediate (me-
solectal) varieties in between. D&T point out that all of these varieties are ideal-
ized in a sense. The position taken in the book is that the continuum is made up
of a restricted number of varieties created by a constrained mixing of its features.
The focus of this descriptive study is on the primarily rural basilectal vari-
eties. The authors draw on multiple sources of data for their study including some
thirty pages of transcriptions of rural GC collected by Arnold Persaud for Derek
Bickerton’s data collection in the early 1970s. Other sources include transcriptions
from Devonish’s (1974) data and stories from other Guyanese folklorists. The vast
majority of the data, however, are taken from Rickford’s (1987) seminal study of GC.
The book is organized as follows: Introductory remarks by the authors, fol-
lowed by a brief paragraph on their theoretical framework, then six numbered
sections on various aspects of GC. These six sections could not be properly con-
sidered ‘chapters,’ as they do not all begin on a new page, and are of vastly different
lengths. They are as follows: 1 — Phonology; 2 — Morphology; 3 — Reduplication;
4 — Lexical Word Classes; 5 — Grammatical Word Classes and Their Phrases; 6
— The Sentence. The book ends with Section 7, a five-page sample GC text with
interlinear and free translations.

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 28:1 (2013), 187–192.  doi 10.1075/jpcl.28.1.10ner
issn – / e-issn – © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 188 Book Reviews

In explaining their theoretical framework, D&T state, ‘[w]e work on the as-
sumption that the formal linguistic patterns at the level of morphology and syntax
are mapped onto a semantic universe and to the pragmatic requirements of dis-
course’ (p. 4). Therefore, they assert that a key feature of their analysis is ‘seeking
to understand the regularities and irregularities at the formal morphological and
syntactic levels by reference to the functions they perform at the semantic and
pragmatic levels’ (p. 4). The authors are faithful to this approach throughout the
book.
Section 1 on Phonology gives an overview of the vowels, consonants, and
tonal system of GC to help the reader understand the subsequent morphological
and syntactic analyses. Twelve phonemic oral vowels and a marginal thirteenth are
listed as well as thirty consonants. Citing the similarity of GC consonants to those
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of Jamaican Creole (JC), the authors use Cassidy’s (1961) phonemic representa-
tion of JC consonant phonemes to summarize GC consonants in a clearly laid
out consonant chart. To further elucidate these consonants, the authors offer pho-
nemic and phonetic representations, descriptions, and Guyanese English transla-
tions for each of the thirty consonants, making this information more accessible
to the non- or less linguistically-trained reader. For example, the consonant ‘p’ is
fully explained below in the example from page 8:

Phonemic Phonetic Description GC GE

Representation Representation translation

/p/ [p] voiceless bilabial stop kyaptin captain

[ph] aspirated voiceless phaan pan
bilabial stop

This section also briefly addresses the tonal system of GC, reinforcing Devonish’s
earlier work (1989, 2002) on this subject. The most important point to be made is
that GC is a restricted tone language with all lexical items having an obligatory HL
(high-low) melody assigned to them on the first or second syllable. Additionally,
some words have a lexically specified HL melody assigned to a syllable following
the one bearing the obligatory HL melody, which produces tonal contrasts. D&T
note correctly that the tonal pattern in single lexical items is reproduced in com-
pounds, providing evidence that the phonological word exists as a unit within GC
grammar.
Section 2 starts the grammatical discussion in earnest, and shows evidence of
the authors’ theoretical approach — the linking of morphology and semantics, and
by extension, use of tonal morphology. The authors assert, ‘GC is in the main an
isolating language. It has no inflectional morphology’ (p. 12). Their stated focus in
 Book Reviews 189

this section is on compounding, GC’s principal word formation device. The native
speaker of GC could easily relate to the interaction between semantics and tone
discussed here. A good example of this is the pattern of tonal alternation, espe-
cially in bisyllabic words, which function as a derivational morphological feature,
as in the following example (p. 14):
sísta ‘sister (sibling)’ sîstá ‘sister (a senior nurse)’

In terms of GC compounds, the authors submit that there are items which meet
both formal and semantic criteria. Through several examples, they demonstrate
that when lexical compounds result from the interaction of semantic and pho-
nological processes ‘the compounding versions involve modifiers whose mean-
ings are more specific than the meanings they bear when they occur in non-com-
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pounding constructions’ (p. 14), as shown hereafter:

Non-Compound Compound With red Compound With oglii & red

óglii !ré:d !flóor > óglii !rê:d flóor > ôglii- rê:d floor
‘ugly red floors’ > ugly red-floors’ > ugly-red-floors’ (p. 15)

Several other categories related to compounds are discussed in this section, includ-
ing semi-compounds, which carry meaning halfway between the full meaning of
the adjective and its restricted compound meaning; semantic and morphosyntac-
tic derivations of some compounds; compounding with +human roots; predicator
+ noun compound noun formation, etc. However, the category that I found most
enlightening was the Predicator Classes and Compouding/Non-Compounding
Modifiers. The authors in this section echo a point that has been made elsewhere
by other linguists, i.e., in GC there is considerable overlap between verbs and ad-
jectives. Their approach on this subject was to label this entire class ‘predicator,’
then analyze the distribution of individual members of this class to explore the ex-
istence of subcategories. In so doing, they came up with three types of Predicators:
Pred1 — one that can take a patient subject (akin to transitive verbs); Pred2 — one
that can optionally take an object, and assign an agent meaning to its subject; and
Pred3 — one that can neither take an object nor a patient subject. The strengths of
this analysis are: (a) its clarifying the grammatical and semantic constraints within
the predicator class; and (b) its links to the universe of discourse, as the differences
often lie in how the predicators are perceived by the speakers. This clarification is
very helpful to the speaker, learner, and teacher of GC.
Section 3 on Reduplication is a logical sequel to Section 2, as it first addresses
Compounding Reduplication, then Syntactic Reduplication. A formal distinction
is made that ‘compounding tone rules may apply to compounding reduplication but
never to syntactic reduplication’ (p. 30). Essentially, compounding reduplication
 190 Book Reviews

means ‘having a feature in bits and pieces, all over ‘ (p. 31), and applies to predi-
cators, nouns (restricted), and other word classes. Depending on whether or not
the subject of the predicator is interpreted as agent or patient, the meaning will be
interpreted respectively as ‘performing an action in fits and starts’ or ‘being in a
state resulting from performance of an action in fits and starts (p. 31)’ A key point
noted in this section is that only reduplicated compounds with appropriate tonal
input can be treated tonally as single phonological words. Several other aspects of
compounding reduplication are also discussed such as non-derived and derived
predicators, quantifiers, and compound reduplication as aspect. What is consistent
in the authors’ approach is that they provide concrete examples in each category to
show the link between morphosyntax, tone, and semantics.
The second half of this section focuses on syntactic reduplication, which the
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authors suggest is key to understanding the syntactic structure of GC, a point with
which I concur. They distinguish syntactic reduplication from its compounding
counterpart by stating it adds the element ‘to an extreme degree’ to the normal
distributive meaning of doing something ‘in fits and starts.’ They divide syntactic
reduplication into two semantic subtypes –progressive and iterative–, and suc-
cessfully illustrate different meanings of syntactic reduplication depending on
their co-occurrence with Pred1 or Pred2 items. Several other examples of syntac-
tic reduplication with different types of phrases –noun phrases, adjective phrases,
adverbials– are offered, in addition to a detailed discussion of reduplication as
aspectual marking. The section ends with a subsection entitled ‘Matters Arising’
in which the authors question the generative concept of I (inflection) as a gram-
matical category, as it applies to GC. They argue that the I’’ or Sentence in GC, in
the case of reduplication, behaves more like a lexical than grammatical item. It
is this kind of questioning of anomalies that pushes the boundaries of linguistic
understandings.
In Section 4, the focus is on the syntactic behavior of lexical items in GC,
specifically with nouns, verb/predicators, and adverbs. Several examples of nouns
as entities in space, animate and inanimate possessor nouns, and predicator and
predicator phrases are discussed. One of the more interesting points in this chapter
is the overlap between nouns and place adverbs. When preceded by a, the phrase
is treated like a noun occupying a point in space, the spatial quality derived from
the preposition. On the other hand, when not preceded by a, the phrase is treated
as an adverb phrase like de. The form without the preposition is more semantically
salient. The following example illustrates the point:
a. yu de bakdam
1S LOC PRED backdam
‘You are at the backdam …’ (Rickford 1987: 163, line 556)
 Book Reviews 191

b. yu de a bakdam
1S LOC PRED PREP backdam
‘You are at the backdam.’ (p. 68)

Native speakers of GC can sense these subtle distinctions, but for the outsider,
these clear linguistic explanations help to make sense of GC.
Section 5, not surprisingly, is the longest, as it covers grammatical word class-
es and their phrases. It examines phrases headed by grammatical items such as
Determiner Phrases (DetPs), Adpositional Phrases (AdPs), and those headed by
Tense, Aspect, and Modal markers (TAM Phrases). The authors address how these
build on phrases headed by lexical items to create well-formed sentences in GC.
They begin by suggesting that the determiner slot, which occurs at the beginning
of the DetP, can be optionally filled with such items as definite articles, demonstra-
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tive adjectives, and so forth. If it is unfilled, it means the related noun phrase is
generic. The key point here is that it is the noun phrase rather than the noun that
signals the generic in GC. We learn later in this section, however, that understand-
ing of the unfilled Det slot requires some sophistication, as the interpretation of
definiteness, for example, comes from pragmatics, not syntax. Here again we see
the authors’ staying true to their theoretical approach — linking syntax to seman-
tics and pragmatics.
The other slot discussed is the quantifier slot. The distinction asserted by the
authors is that ‘definiteness is the syntactic property of the determiner slot and
indefiniteness that of the quantifier slot in the noun phrase’ (p. 86). They point out
that items in the Det slot cannot co-occur with indefinites, but with other items
filling the quantifier slot, a restriction that is not syntactic, but rather due to a
pragmatic clash — the inability for a noun to be at once definite and indefinite. The
following two examples illustrate the difference:
(a) *di som máan
DEF QUAN-INDEF man
(b) di wán máan
DEF QUAN-NUM man (p. 87)

A lengthy discussion of personal pronouns is offered, especially third-person plu-

ral dém, the only pronoun that co-occurs with the demonstrative, da ‘not here.’
Subsections follow the discussion on classes of determiners, adpositional phras-
es, then predicator markers, especially aspect markers. The subsection on aspect
could have been separated, first to break up this excessively long section, but also
because TAM is sufficiently large in scope that it merits its own treatment in a
separate section. In GC, what is significant is that overt marking of tense, and to
some degree, aspect, is optional.
 192 Book Reviews

Section 6 — The Sentence, is only two pages long (pp. 134–136). It merely re-
inforces the idea that, in terms of reduplication, the sentence functions as an ex-
tended projection of the predicator. Finally, a very interesting and authentic GC
text is provided in Section 7 to end the book.
On the back cover of this book it is stated that ‘this should be a grammar
which is useful both to the linguist seeking a description which is insightful and
backed by supporting evidence, as well as by native speakers who have an interest
in their own language.’ The book fulfills the first goal very well. The Guyanese-born
lead author brings native speaker expertise to his impressive body of research on
GC over the past thirty-five years. Moreover, the volume offers rigorous linguistic
analysis, clearly delineated grammatical rules, a plethora of authentic examples,
and deft linking of syntax to semantics, pragmatics. Discourse scholars and cre-
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olists alike will no doubt welcome this work.

However, with regard to the second goal (description for native non-linguists
interested in GC), the level of specialized linguistic knowledge required to under-
stand the text would be far beyond that of most native speakers of GC. The book
thus appeals to a more limited specialized audience. Still, D&T’s volume is the
only comprehensive description of GC grammar, and as such is a significant and
welcome contribution to creole linguistics.

References

Cassidy, Frederic. 1961. Jamaica talk: Three hundred years of the English language in Jamaica.
London: McMillan.
Devonish, Hubert. 1974. Urban creole as a regional variety of Guyanese Creole. University of
Guyana, Ms.
Devonish, Hubert. 1989. Language variation theory in the light of co-occurrence restriction
rules. York Papers in Linguistics 13. 129–139.
Devonish, Hubert. 2002. Talking rhythm stressing tone: The role of prominence in Anglo- West
African Creole languages. Kingston: Arawak Publications.
Rickford, John. 1987. Dimensions of a creole continuum. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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