This is the first major study of the conservative or basilectal English creoles of the Anglophone Caribbean since Bailey's (1966) and Bickerton's (1975) descriptions of Jamaican and Guyanese Creole respectively. The book offers a comprehensive, unified treatment of the core areas of CEC predication, including the verb complex, auxiliary ordering, voice and valency, copular and attributive predication, serial verb constructions and complementation. Particularly note-worthy is its utilization of an extremely rich data base and a variety of sources to provide an up-to-date, state of the art account of predicate structures in CEC. The book presents new analyses of several areas of CEC syntax, including such phenonema as passivization, serialization and complementation, which have not been thoroughly analyzed, if at all, in the previous literature. The areas covered in the book involve a wide range of grammatical phenomena centering around the various sub-classes of verb and their subcategorization.
The book consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and six chapters, each of which explores some aspect of the behavior of verbs (or verb-like predicators) and the constructions in which they occur. The book is intended to be a pre-theoretical account of the facts of CEC predication. However, to further elucidate the workings of the grammar and add some degree of explicitness to the description, the author also presents more formal analyses of the grammatical phenomena, employing the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG).