Hawai'i Creole: Morphology and Syntax

Abstract

Hawai'i Creole is a creole language lexified predominantly by English but also by other languages such as Hawaiian and Japanese. It is spoken by approximately 600,000 people in the American state of Hawai'i. For details on its lexicon and origins (including an account of the influence of other languages on its morphosyntax), see section I of the chapter on the phonology of Hawai'i Creole (Sakoda and Siegel, this volume). Although the lexicon of Hawai'i Creole is closely related to English, its morphology and syntax are quite distinct. In general, like other creole languages, the amount of bound morphology is less than that of the lexifier language and there are quite different morphosyntactic rules for expressing tense, aspect, modality and negation, as well as for relativization, complementation and focusing.