Tonal morphology in a creole: High-tone raising in Saramaccan serial verb constructions

We have seen in this paper that Saramaccan is apparently unique among Atlantic creoles in that it makes use of inflectional tonal morphology. While the existence of such morphology is an interesting fact for studies of Saramaccan itself, it also could have bearing on McWhorter’s (1998) notion of the creole prototype since a lack of both inflectional and tonal morphology is taken by him to be an important typological property of creole languages. Importantly, however, an analysis of available evidence indicates that these morphemes do not appear to be the result of substrate transfer but are instead a languageinternal innovation.

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