@phdthesis{35230,
  author          = {Vrzic, Zvjezdana},
  pages           = {312},
  school          = {New York University},
  title           = {Modeling Pidgin/Creole Genesis: Universals and Contact Influence in Chinook Jargon Syntax},
  year            = {1999},
  abstract        = {The purpose of the dissertation is to show that the morpho-syntactic reduction of the languages in contact in pidgin/creole genesis has a crucial role in the development of their syntax. The loss of inflectional morphology induces the formation of common pidgin and creole features, and at the same time, linguistically constrains contact influence in these languages. I concentrate on Chinook Jargon (CJ), a pidgin that was spoken in the Pacific Northwest of U.S. and Canada in the nineteenth century. My corpus consists of the texts published in Kamloops, British Columbia that I have transcribed from Duployan shorthand and translated. The dissertation has six chapters. In Chapter 1 I critically review the theories of pidgin/creole genesis, and present the theoretical background—the Principles and Parameters syntactic theory (Chomsky 1993, 1995). In Chapter 2 I review the theories of origin of Chinook Jargon, and in Chapter 3 I provide a grammatical sketch of CJ. In Chapters 4 and 5 I propose an analysis of two syntactic features of CJ—basic SVO word order, and 'pre-sentential' negation. Chapter 6 is a conclusion. A sample of the texts used for analysis is in the appendix. The complete lack of inflectional morphology in CJ stands in stark contrast to the American Indian source languages (e.g., Chinook and Chehalis) with head-marking and cross-referencing inflectional morphology. In addition, CJ is SVO in contrast to the dominant VSO order of the source languages. This is explained by recourse to the correlation between the presence of overt verbal morphology, strength of IP functional features and the existence of verb movement, in line with current research in comparative and diachronic syntax. On the other hand, the negative construction in CJ has several properties in common with the source languages. Contact influence in this area of CJ syntax was possible because the strength of functional features here is not dependent on the existence of inflectional morphology.},
  adviser         = {Singler, John Victor},
  bestfn          = {north_america\vrzic_chinook-jargon1999v2_o.pdf},
  besttxt         = {ptxt2\north_america\vrzic_chinook-jargon1999v2_o.txt},
  cfn             = {north_america\vrzic_chinook-jargon1999_o.pdf},
  degree          = {PhD},
  delivered       = {north_america\vrzic_chinook-jargon1999_o.pdf},
  digital_formats = {PDF 10.49Mb image-only PDF},
  fn              = {north_america\vrzic_modeling1999_o.pdf, north_america\vrzic_modeling1999.pdf, north_america\vrzic_chinook-jargon1999v2_o.pdf, north_america\vrzic_chinook-jargon1999_o.pdf},
  hhtype          = {grammar_sketch;comparative},
  inlg            = {English [eng]},
  isbn            = {9780599473119},
  lgcode          = {Le Jeune's CW = Pidgin Chinook Jargon [NOCODE_Pidgin-Chinook-Jargon]},
  macro_area      = {North America},
  source          = {DAI-A 60/09, p. 3346, Mar 2000},
  src             = {hh},
  subject         = {LANGUAGE, LINGUISTICS (0290)},
  umi_id          = {9945361}
}