Jamaican Creole tense and aspect in contact: Insights from acquisition and loss

This paper presents an account of the use of the progressive aspect and the simple past tense in the speech of three-year-olds from Jamaican Creole (JC) speaking communities, as well as in the speech of JC-speaking migrants to Curaçao, who now function in a second language (L2) dominant environment. We compare the two data sets, and find that parallels may be drawn between the interlanguages of these speakers; there are patterns of the mixing of the L1 with the languages in contact in the progressive construction, but little mixing in the past tense, where Creole forms persist in the speech of both sets of speakers. Such parallels may be unsurprising, given Winford’s (2003: 256) assertion that “the phenomena involved in language attrition ... are similar to those found in many other cases of contact ...”. We conclude that there are fundamental differences between the expression of pastness in JC and in the target languages, and suggest that this lack of congruence may cause difficulty in learning the L2 (Winford 2003: 252). We suggest further, that the promotion of language awareness in language arts classrooms will go a long way to overcoming this difficulty