16.1892, Review: Lang Description/Creole Lang: Hackert (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1892. Sun Jun 19 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1892, Review: Lang Description/Creole Lang: Hackert (2004)

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1)
Date: 16-Jun-2005
From: Cristina Martínez-Sanz < cristy45 at hotmail.com >
Subject: Urban Bahamian Creole: System and variation 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 18:17:27
From: Cristina Martínez-Sanz < cristy45 at hotmail.com >
Subject: Urban Bahamian Creole: System and variation 
 

AUTHOR: Hackert, Stephanie 
TITLE: Urban Bahamian Creole 
SUBTITLE: System and variation 
SERIES: Varieties of English Around the World G32 
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins 
YEAR: 2004 
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2235.html


Cristina Martínez-Sanz, Department of Modern Languages, 
University of Ottawa

OVERVIEW

The book under review constitutes a synchronic study of the black Bahamian 
vernacular spoken in Nassau. Specifically, it focuses on the description 
of the system of past inflection in urban Bahamian Creole English (urban 
BahCE). Past marking is one of the most researched areas in the linguistic 
study of Creole languages and related varieties such as African-American 
Vernacular English (AAVE). However, the discussion on the specific 
meanings, uses and forms of the linguistic items relevant for past marking 
in these languages is still going strong. As far as Creoles are concerned, 
the use of preverbal particles, as well as the use of the unmarked verb, 
have been traditionally identified as prominent features of the Creoles' 
Tense-Mood-Aspect (TMA) systems. The author offers a description of the 
use and distribution of these two mechanisms in urban BahCE, but her 
quantitative analysis of the corpus of data she elaborated focuses on what 
has been described as a "typically mesolectal mechanism" (Patrick 1999: 
223), namely the alternation between past-marked and uninflected verbs in 
past-temporal reference. 

The book is organized as follows: Chapter 1 is an introduction, in which 
the author justifies her choice of an urban variety of a Creole language 
for her study and outlines the general organization of the rest of the 
book. Chapter 2 is methodological. In it, Hackert first summarizes 
previous research on the linguistic varieties of the Bahamas, as well as 
the main accounts of TMA systems in Creoles that have been put forward in 
the relevant literature. In the second part of this chapter, she describes 
her data sample and the research techniques that were used both to collect 
the data and to analyze them afterwards. Chapter 3 focuses on the 
sociohistorical circumstances that gave rise to the formation of BahCE 
during the colonial period, and studies the social constitution of 
nowadays Nassau, as well as the sociolinguistics of urban BahCE and 
Standard English (StE) in the Bahamas. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the 
linguistic analysis of past marking in urban BahCE. Chapter 4 constitutes 
a general description of the forms, meanings and uses of the linguistic 
items involved in past reference in urban BahCE: Aspect and Tense 
categories, as well as copula structures are studied. Chapter 5 is 
dedicated to the quantitative analysis of variable past inflection, which 
is analyzed according to verb category, grammatical constraints such as 
lexical and grammatical aspect and disambiguating contextual elements, and 
also according to the correlations between linguistic behaviours and 
social variables. Chapter 6 is the conclusion.

SYNOPSIS

Chapter 1.Introduction
In this first chapter, Hackert explains how traditionally Creole 
linguistic studies have focused on the analysis of basilectal varieties of 
these languages, i.e., "that variety of any creole which is furthest 
removed from its historical lexifier and/or contemporary standard". 
(Hackert 2004:1). According to the author, this focus on the basilectal 
varieties of Creoles has had as a consequence that the knowledge of these 
varieties is in some respects still only partial. Consequently, "typical" 
Creoles such as the ones spoken in Jamaica, Guyana or Haiti have been 
frequently studied, while varieties like the ones spoken in Barbados, the 
Bahamas or the Cayman Islands have received much less attention, on the 
basis of their assumed similarity to mainstream varieties of English. In 
the last part of the chapter, the author gives us an outline of the 
content of the book, and explains how the use of the quantitative methods 
of sociolinguistics in her study allows her to offer a detailed analysis 
of the different factors that have an effect on variation in past 
inflection, which range from grammatical constraints to discourse-
pragmatic an social factors.   

Chapter 2. Methodology
This chapter is divided in three main parts. In the first one, Hackert 
reviews the previous studies on language in the Bahamas, noting that the 
research of the Bahamian varieties began very recently, with Reinecke et 
al's (1975) and Shilling's (1978) works. After those seminal 
contributions, research on BahCE has concentrated on two main areas: on 
the one hand, its status as a Creole or as a "decreolized" variety 
(Alleyne 1980), which still today is controversial, and its relationship 
to other Caribbean English lexicon Creoles (CECs) and AAVE, on the other. 
The latter issue has been studied in connection with the long-held 
controversy on the (non)-Creole origins of AAVE, with Holm's (1983) theory 
on the similarities between Gullah and BahCE, which claimed that  both 
languages shared as a common ancestor the Creole spoken in the Eighteenth 
Century in the American South setting the starting point for this 
discussion. 

The second part of the chapter summarizes some of the accounts that have 
been put forward in the literature of the Tense, Mood and Aspect 
categories in Creoles. Specifically, Hackert reports Bickerton's (1981) 
model of the TMA systems of Creoles. This system consists first, of an 
inventory of three categories ("Anterior" tense, "Irrealis" mood, and "non-
punctual" aspect), and second, of a parameter that determines the meaning 
of the different verb structures in the language, namely, the stative/non-
stative distinction: "The Tense particle expresses [+Anterior], (very 
roughly, past-before past for action verbs and past for stative verbs); 
the modality particle expresses [+Irrealis] (which includes futures and 
conditionals), while the aspect particle expresses [+Nonpunctual] 
(progressive-durative plus habitual-iterative). The stem form in isolation 
expresses the unmarked term in these three oppositions, i.e., present 
statives and past non-statives." (Bickerton 1981:58, cited in Hackert 
2004:13). 

Hackert acknowledges the crucial impact of Bickerton's theory to Creole 
studies, but at the same time she points out some of its shortcomings: 
first, a theory like the one Bickerton puts forward implies an abrupt 
nativization hypothesis for Creole formation, an issue which continues to 
be controversial in Creole linguistics nowadays. On the other hand, not 
all the Creoles that have been studied have the tripartite TMA system that 
Bickerton proposes, as Gibson (1984) noted for Guyanese Creole and Winford 
(2000) noted for Sranan. These issues lead Hackert to follow instead the 
typological approach proposed by Dahl (1985) to account for 
crosslinguistic similarities among TMA systems. Within Dahl's "prototype 
approach", the basic units for the analyisis are not the semantic features 
that Bickerton assumed to be universally underlying TMA categories, but 
the actual TMA categories themselves: " More concretely speaking, this 
means that I think of a language-specific TMA category like, say, the 
English Perfect, as the realization of a cross-linguistic category -or 
better, category type- PERFECT, rather than as the realization of a set of 
features, say /+X, -Y,+Z/." (Dahl 1985: 33, cited in Hackert 2004:16). 
Hackert takes Dahl's theory as a point of departure, as well as the 
questionnaire on TMA categories elaborated by him, in order to extract 
information on the possible uses, meanings and realizations of such 
categories in urban BahCE. This questionnaire consists of a series of 
sentences and short texts to be translated from English into the language 
that is investigated. In addition to this questionnaire, the rest of the 
material that Hackert analyzes is constituted by a large corpus of 
conversational data, based on sociolinguistic interviews to 25 speakers 
designed to elicit vernacular language, which are analyzed with 
quantitative methods, specifically with the Varbrul package for MS-DOS, 
which determines the strength and direction of the various factors, 
linguistic or of other nature, affecting the application of a given rule. 
Finally, a "professionals simple" consisting of a set of interviews with 
linguistically sensitive professionals in the community, such as teachers 
or journalists, was used to investigate the sociolinguistics of BahCE. 

Chapter 3. Sociohistory and Sociolinguistics
In this chapter, Hackert investigates in detail the sociohistorial 
circumstances that gave rise to the language contact situation that 
subsequently derived in the formation of BahCE. In the first part of the 
chapter the early colonial period is studied, and the community settings 
and the modes of interaction among this communities, characterized by a 
closer contact between blacks and whites than in other Caribbean islands 
and by the impossibility of the formation of a typical plantation economy 
in the Bahamas because of the poorness of the Bahamian soil are described. 
The author hypothesizes that it is unlikely that that a full-fledged 
Creole was being used in the Bahamian islands before the 1780s. In that 
decade, the slaves of the North American Loyalists arrived in the islands, 
and brought with them their form of speech, which is assumed to be an 
early variety of Gullah that  extended in the southern Bahamian islands. 
After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, no more African slaves 
were taken to the Bahamas by British traders; however, Africans continued 
to arrive to New Providence during all the nineteenth century, a fact that 
must have contributed to the restructuring of English in that particular 
island, while the situation in more remote islands must have been 
different. In the twentieth century, two main factors contributed to the 
social shaping of the Bahamas, especially after World War II: first, the 
enormous growth of population, and second the migration of the majority of 
the habitants of the islands to the city; as a result, nowadays two thirds 
of the Bahamian population lives in Nassau.    

The chapter finishes with a sociolinguistic analysis of BahCE, in which 
the author examines the role of the vernacular in politics, the media and 
education, and summarizes the attitudes of the Bahamians with respect to 
BahCE and StE. It is explained how the boundaries between the standard and 
the vernacular are not clear, due in part to the intermediate varieties 
which exist between the more conservative or basilectal Creole and the 
local standard Bahamian English. Finally, the author notes that although 
the "post-colonial consciousness" developed after independence has had as 
a consequence a change in the traditionally negative attitudes towards the 
vernacular and an inclusion of BahCE in the public domain, still today 
these negative attitudes are found among Bahamians.  

Chapter 4. Past Temporal Reference: Categories, Meanings and Uses
In this chapter Hackert describes the urban BahCE system of past temporal 
reference taking as a point of departure her conversational data as well 
as Dahl's (1985) TMA questionnaire . She summarizes the properties of 
Aspect and Tense in this language, and identifies the categories or 
category types involved in past marking, investigating not only their 
formal realizations, but also their meanings and uses. The author draws 
special attention to specific particles, such as preverbal 'done' 
and 'did', since these two particles have been traditionally at the core 
of the controversies regarding the verbal systems of Creole languages.

The first part of the Chapter describes Aspect in urban BahCE, identifying 
basically three aspectual categories: the Perfective, the Imperfective, 
and the Completive. As far as the Perfective is concerned, it is 
identified as a "neutral" aspectual category with respect to tense 
marking; however, its default reading is past for non-stative verbs and 
present for statives as long as temporal indicators do not trigger a past 
reading for statives as well. It is usually instantiated by the unmarked 
verb, as seen in the following examples:
(1) He took off all the hair off his head and -it -it look ridiculous 
(Jeanne 3:13)
(2) Jesus love me (Sharon 14:1) 

Regarding Imperfective Aspect, the most common Imperfectives are Habitual 
and Progressive. In urban BahCE, just as in StE, the Progressive is 
expressed by V-'ing', the only difference being the nature of the 
auxiliary preceding the verb; the auxiliary is usually omitted in the 
present but occurs in the past in invariable form. Habituals are expressed 
by periphrastic forms of 'do', a phenomenon which is explained 
diachronically: there is evidence (Winford 1998) that CECs ultimately 
derive from southwestern English dialects, in which the use of 
periphrastic 'do' as a Habitual marker was extremely common in earlier 
periods. Moreover, the fact that the unamarked verb has a Perfective 
reading by default in this language contributes to the occurrence of 
periphrastic forms of 'do' as Habitual markers. As far as Completive 
Aspect is concerned, it is instantiated by the preverbal marker 'done', as 
in all other CECs. This particle has been particularly controversial in 
the Creole TMA system debate, since in Bickerton's (1981) theory there was 
no room for a Completive marker, given that the Aspect slot was occupied 
in that system by the punctual/non-puctual system. However, Hackert's data 
show how 'done' is integrated into the BachCE TMA system and it occurs 
with stative and non-stative predicates and in combination with other 
markers, as the following examples show:
(3) I did done start working (Carol 6/4/97, 3:25)
(4) I was done in the service (Carol 6/4/97, 3:33)
(5) I gotta learn how to drive, 'cause with my age people should -people-w-
shoulda done learn how to drive long time.
 
The second part of the chapter describes Tense in urban BahCE, and 
concentrates on the uses and meanings that preverbal 'did' has in this 
variety. In Bickerton's system, this particle is understood as 
a "anterior" tense marker, meaning "very roughly, past-before-past for 
action verbs and past for stative verbs" (Bikerton 1981:58, cited in 
Hackert 2003: 86). However, the fact that not all of the data on different 
CECs follow this pattern has led different scholars to propose, on the one 
hand, that preverbal 'did' acts as a "Relative Past Marker" (Winford 
1993), locating a given situation as past in relation to a relevant 
reference time (RT), or , on the other, in a discourse oriented analysis, 
that this particle functions as a "Background Marker", (Winford 2000), 
that places events in a subsidiary position with respect to the main 
events described in the speech act. This last proposal seems to account 
for most of Hackert's data.

The following section of the chapter deals with the meanings and 
realizations of the Perfect category in urban BahCE. The author describes 
the different perfect meanings that can be expressed, which are 
instantiated by the unmarked verb, 'done', and constructions with 'been' 
or 'was'. 

Finally, the last part of the chapter is focused on copula structures in 
urban BahCE. Although the past copula in this language can be instantiated 
by a number of forms, 'been' and 'was' are the more frequent ones. 
Hackert's data show how, as noted by Shilling (1978), at least for the 
more basilectal speakers the selection of one of these two copulas is 
based on the nature of the complement that follow the copula, with 
locative complements clearly favoring the use of 'been'. 

Chapter 5. Past Marking by Verb Inflection
In this chapter the variable inflection of lexical verbs indicating past 
temporal reference is investigated. In Hackert's data, the alternation 
between unmarked and inflected verbs covers a large amount of the 
speakers' production, with unmarked verbs accounting for 68% of all verbs 
occurring in her sample. The author's aim is to determine what underlying 
patterns, in the form of grammatical constraints or social factors are 
responsible for this variation. 

The author starts defining the "envelope of variation", and then she turns 
to analyze past marking in urban BahCE. First, she investigates if 
membership in a particular verb category has an effect in the inflectional 
behaviour of verbs. Hackert establishes lexical and morphological verb 
categories for urban BahCE building on the categorizations by Bickerton 
(1975), Winford (1992) and Patrick (1991) for other CECs, and she studies 
the behaviour of individual verbs and verb categories both overall and in 
the speech of individual sample members. In a nutshell, among the verbs 
that the author classifies as "exceptional verbs" 
('go', 'have', 'make', 'do', 'say' and 'get'), 'have' is the most 
frequently marked for past inflection, followed by 'go' and 'do'. As far 
as what Hackert labels 'major verb categories', she finds similar rates of 
past inflection for the different groups of irregular verbs, and the 
Varbrul quantitative analyses show that grammatical as well as 
phonological and extralinguistic factors play a role in the past marking 
behaviour of these groups of verbs. 

Second, Hackert studies the role of grammatical factors such as aspect and 
temporal disambiguation on past inflection in BahCE, and compares her 
results with the patterns that other authors have found for other CECs and 
AAVE. Regarding Aspect, Bickerton (1975) stated that "non-punctual" verb 
forms strongly trigger past inflection; however, Hackert finds that the 
two aspectual dimensions subsumed under the label "non-punctual", namely 
stativity and habituality, appear to trigger opposed effects in past 
inflection: while stativity favours past inflection, habituality, in 
accordance with the results that Patrick (1999) obtained for Jamaican 
Creole, seems to strongly disfavour it. However, further analysis leads 
Hackert to conclude that the propensity of statives to be past-inflected 
is only apparent and due to the presence in the sample of high-frequency 
items, such 'have', 'think' and 'want', a result that was found in the 
quantitative analyses by verb category mentioned above as well; as soon as 
these items are removed from the analysis, the propensity of statives to 
be unmarked does not appear so clearly. On the other hand, perfective verb 
situations seem to strongly favour past-marking by inflection. Therefore, 
Hackert's results are in accordance with the ones find for Trinitarian 
Creole (TC) by Winford (1992), who stated that that grammatical aspect is 
the basic parameter underlying past-marking patterns in that language. As 
the author notes, the effects of grammatical aspect can be observed in 
temporal disambiguation by temporal conjunctions and temporal adverbials 
as well: while past inflection does not seem to be affected by the 
presence or absence of temporal conjunctions, temporal adverbials of 
certain kinds do affect past marking. Specifically, whereas durative 
adverbials favor past inflection, adverbials of frequency, which usually 
co-occur with habitual aspect, disfavor it.   

In the third part of the chapter, the author analyzes variation in past 
marking by style, which is defined as "variation within the speech of an 
individual speaker which is determined by discourse type" (Hackert 
2004:202). What the author labels the "chat mode", as opposed to the 
different kinds of narrative speech that she studies, is considered the 
default style, and the one in which higher rates of inflection were 
found,  both for most of the speakers and overall. As far as narrative 
speech is concerned, Hackert distinguishes three different kinds, 
the "narrative of personal experience", the folktale, and the "generic 
narrative". While narratives of personal experience and folktales showed 
similar rates of past inflection, generic narratives showed the lowest 
rates among the three kinds of narratives. The author attributes this 
result to the fact that habituality is the defining characteristic of this 
type of narrative. 

Finally, Hackert studies social variation in the use of past inflection, 
in order to see how speakers' characteristics such as age, gender, 
education and social class relate to linguistic behaviour. She finds that 
none of these variables by themselves completely accounts for the 
variation in past inflection. Due to the specific social constitution and 
social history of the Bahamas, the variable of age is closely related to 
the variable of education, and gender distinctions are relevant to speech 
patters only if we relate them with social class. This leads the author to 
analyze these variables in individual speakers, trying to correlate 
linguistic behaviour with social class, and she finds that this 
correlation is only indirect.   

Chapter 6. Conclusion
In this final chapter Hackert summarizes some of the main findings that 
her study of urban BahCE gave rise to. First, the grammatical properties 
that distance urban BahCE from StE are highlighted, among them the use of 
the unmarked verb as an instantiation of the Perfective aspect, the 
particle 'done' as a Completive marker, and the use of preverbal 'did' to 
express Relative Past. In addition, it is noted how these features are 
part of the "common core" of grammatical properties that Winford (1996) 
attributed to the TMA systems of basically all English-lexified Creoles of 
the Caribbean. The patterns of verb inflection found in BahCE also 
parallel the ones found in the study of other CECs: the results for the  
occurrence of {-ed} according to verb category, on the one hand, and 
grammatical aspect, on the other,  are similar to the ones established in 
Winford (1992) for TC and AAVE. Habituality was found to be relevant for 
past inflection as well, not only as a grammatical constraint by itself, 
but also as the characterizing feature of the discourse type of "generic 
narrative". The correlation between social factors and linguistic 
variation was also investigated. Two biological variables, namely sex and 
age, and two social variables, social class and education, were tested. 
The sex variable was found not to be of crucial importance in the use of 
past inflection, at least if we do not relate it to social class, while 
the age variable, owing to historical circumstances, is highly related 
with the education variable. Finally, as long as the social distribution 
and attitudes towards BahCE and StE are concerned, the author found that 
the perception of these two varieties and the roles attributed to them are 
homogeneous among the Bahamian speech community. Specifically, even though 
the growth of a "post-colonial consciousness" has had as a consequence the 
conception of BahCE as part of the national identity and the entrance of 
the Creole in the domains of politics, the media, and education, which 
were traditionally reserved for StE, some negative attitudes towards BahCE 
are still found in the community.   

All of the above summarized findings, and especially the typological 
analysis of the categories involved in the TMA system of urban BahCE 
carried out in Chapter 4, as well as the analysis of the data in Chapter 
5, lead Hackert to conclude: first, that the black Bahamian vernacular is 
best and most usefully defined as a Creole, a question that has been of 
some controversy in the discussion of the status of this vernacular in the 
relevant literature. Second, the author concludes that Creole strategies 
for expressing time reference and temporal relations are not reduced to 
the ones assumed in the "typical" Creole TMA system; specifically, not 
only preverbal markers and unmarked verbs are used for past inflection, 
but also the mechanism of verb inflection seems to be of great relevance, 
as well as governed by different kinds of grammatical constraints, 
discourse requirements and social factors. Therefore, according to 
Hackert, in investigating the similarities among the TMA systems of 
different Creoles we should not only attend to the similarities found 
among them, but also to the differences in forms, meanings and uses. 
Therefore, Hackert concludes, even though TMA systems are one of the most 
researched areas in Creole linguistics, a considerable amount of room is 
still left for the research and the characterization of these systems.  

EVALUATION

The book constitutes an exhaustive study of past marking in urban BahCE. 
One of the main contributions of the volume is the thorough investigation 
of an urban variety of a Creole language; as noted by the author herself, 
urban or non-basilectal varieties of Creoles have traditionally received 
little linguistic attention, especially those urban varieties of Creoles 
such as the one spoken in the Bahamas, which have been assumed to be 
closer in the Creole continuum to Standard English. In investigating past 
inflection in urban BahCE, Hackert deals also with some of the fundamental 
issues that have been discussed in Creole studies, such as the question of 
the origins of particular Creoles and/or related varieties, theories about 
Creole formation, or the features of different sorts that qualify a 
specific variety as a Creole.  In addition, she offers an accurate 
description of the TMA system of urban BahCE. The fact that this is one of 
the most researched areas of Creole grammars allows her to draw the 
parallels between her findings for urban BahCE and other CECs that have 
been investigated in other works. On the other hand, the accurate 
investigation of the urban BahCE TMA system shows evidence for the need of 
the revision of the traditional "typical TMA system", which has been 
assumed in a number of studies of different Creoles since the seminal 
works of Bickerton (1974, 1975, 1981). To sum up, the book constitutes an 
excellent tool not only for the scholars or students interested in the 
grammar of urban BahCE, but also for the study of some of the fundamental 
issues that are still being discussed in Creole linguistics. 

REFERENCES

Alleyne, M. C. (1980): Comparative Afro-American. Ann Arbor: Karoma.

Bickerton, D. (1974): "Creolization, linguistic universals, natural 
semantax and the brain". University of Hawaii Working Papers in 
Linguistics 6: 124-41.

Bickerton, D. (1975): Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press.

Bickerton, D. (1981): Roots of Language. Ann Arbor: Karoma.

Dahl, Ö. (1985): Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.

Gibson, K. (1984): "Evidence against and anterior time system in Guyanese 
and Jamaican Creoles". York Papers in Linguistics 11: 123-9.

Holm, J. (1983): "On the relationship between Gullah and Bahamian". 
American Speech 58: 303-18.

Patrick, P. (1991): "Creoles at the intersection of variable processes: -
t,d deletion and past-marking in the Jamaican mesolect". Language 
Variation and Change 3: 171-89.

Patrick, P. (1999): Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect. 
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Reinecke, J, S. M. Tsuzaki, D.DeCamp, I. F. Hancock & R. E. Woods (1975): 
A Bibliography of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Honolulu, HI: University 
Press of Hawaii.

Shilling, A. (1978): Some non-standard features of Bahamian Dialect 
syntax. Ph D dissertation, University of Hawaii.

Tagliamonte, S. (1999): "Modelling an emergent grammar: Past temporal 
reference in St Kitts Creole in the 1780s". In P. Baker & A. Bruyn, (eds): 
St Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles. London: University of Westminster 
Press, 201-36.

Winford, D. (1992): "Back to the past: The BEV/Creole connection 
revisited". Language Variation and Change 4: 311-57.

Winford, D. (1996): "Common ground and Creole TMA". Journal of Pidgin and 
Creole Languages 11:71-84.

Winford, D. (1998): "On the origins of African American Vernacular 
English: A creolist perspective". Part 2: Linguistic features. Diachronica 
15: 99-154.

Winford, D. (2000): "Tense and Aspect in Sranan and the creole prototype". 
In J. H. MacWhorter (ed): Language Change and Language Contact in Pidgins 
and Creoles. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp.383-442. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Cristina Martínez-Sanz is a PhD student at the Department of Modern 
Languages, University of Ottawa. Her research interests are Syntax, First 
and Second Language Acquisition, Diachronic Linguistics and Creole 
languages.





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