Verse Analysis and the Nature of Creole Discourse

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.

Tsr Formation as a Discourse Substratum in Hawaii Creole English

Hawaii Creole English presents a particular type of utterance structure, the "dollar utterance," which might be regarded as ill-formed in terms of the form-meaning coalition in Standard English (SE). Nonetheless, such an utterance seems to reflect an underlying discourse process in which three discourse representations — Theme, Scheme, Rheme — interact. An analysis is given within the framework of Schema theory to explain this unique linguistic phenomenon in Hawaii Creole English. The scheme, which is the most important entity of the three, resides either in the preceding text or in the abstract knowledge structure of human cognition. It is further claimed that the formation of Theme, Scheme, Rheme could have been transferred from Japanese as one of its substratum features in discourse. The probability of Japanese substratal influence is highly supportable from both linguistic and sociohistorical evidence.

Influences in the Development of Children's Language Attitudes

The study focuses on factors which influence the attitudes of children toward standard and nonstandard language varieties. In a multicultural rural community in Hawaii where communicative competence includes to varying degrees a knowledge of both standard English and Hawaii Creole English, data were collected to measure the following : language attitudes of 68 kindergarten and first grade children, the fluency of these children in standard English and Hawaii Creole English, and language attitudes of the parents of the children. Multiple regression analyses of the data indicate the following : no significant effect of parent attitudes on those of a child; the relaÂtive importance of ethnic background and length of residence in the speech community; sex as an important variable in determining language perceptions; a tendency to greater preference for a dialect as profiÂciency in it increases.