Review of Viveka Velupillai. 2003. 'Hawai'i Creole English: A Typological Analysis of the Tense-Mood-Aspect System'. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave McMillan. xv + 216 pp. GBP 45.00. (hb; ISBN 0-333-99340-3)

Abstract

Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) has been a key language in theoretical debates about the origins of creole languages. Bickerton (1977, 1981, 1984) pointed out that many grammatical features of HCE are similar to those of creoles that developed on plantations in other parts of the world, despite the fact that very different substrate languages were involved (e.g. African languages in the Atlantic region as opposed to Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese and Filipino languages in Hawai'i). However, the contact situations were similar in that children learning their first language on the plantations were exposed to a highly variable and undeveloped pre-pidgin. As this was not a fully developed language, the children had to fall back on their innate linguistic capacity to turn it into one. The similarity among HCE and other creoles is thus explained by universal characteristics of human linguistic endowment – Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH). Since the most comprehensive descriptions of important grammatical features of HCE have been from Bickerton himself, this new study of the language is a welcome contribution to the field.