A Contrastive Grammar Islander--Caribbean Standard English--Spanish (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: A contrastive grammar Islander—Caribbean Standard English—Spanish by Angela Bartens Marsha Forbes and Silvia Kouwenberg A contrastive grammar Islander—Caribbean Standard English—Spanish. By Angela Bartens. (Humanoria 327.) Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2003. Pp. 175. ISBN 9514109406. €25. Unusual for this kind of work, Angela Barten’s contrastive grammar of Islander, the English-lexified creole of San Andrés and Providence Island, includes two languages rather than one for the contrastive description. This is justified by the linguistic situation and educational needs of the communities in which Islander is spoken (14), where both English and Spanish are present (the latter as the official language and language of education). Although B intends the primary audience of the work to be native islanders (17), it is apparent, even from the introduction, that the work assumes a fairly sophisticated reader, such as a teachers’ college graduate. While based on field work carried out by the author, the potential usefulness of the publication for linguists is compromised by B’s accommodations to her intended audience, resulting in a description that necessarily remains superficial. [End Page 769] The reference in the title to Caribbean Standard English is gratuitous, since no Caribbean Standard variety of English has, as yet, been codified, and B makes no attempt to do so in this publication. For instance, her listing of conjunctions provides English since as the equivalent of Islander faan/fram (< from), but Standard English speakers in Jamaica frequently use from as a conjunction, as is done in Islander (e.g. From I was a child, I…). After the introduction sets out the contrastive approach and explains the spelling conventions adopted, the work is organized into two parts, Part 1 dealing with constituents and phrases, Part 2 with sentential constructs. The decision to use the spelling representations proposed by the Islander Spelling Committee actually obscures consistencies across Caribbean English Creoles, especially since the reasons for some of the Committee’s decisions were emotive and based on cosmetics (i.e. a desire to make the spelling ‘visually elegant’, 17). Since the data collection which forms the basis for the work was carried out in the islands in 2001 and 2002, the study is reflective of contemporary Islander Creole. Unfortunately, no information is provided about the speakers that B worked with. Since Spanish is now the first and increasingly the only language of Islander children (14), the age of informants would have been a relevant factor for the description. Despite B’s claim that Islander forms the basis for the comparison, Islander constructions which have no English or Spanish counterparts receive little attention. For example, serial verb constructions are given a scant half page. As is commonly true of contrastive descriptive studies, the study fails in analysis, and there is no discussion of the relevance of the contrasts between Islander and the other languages to language learning and pedagogy. Finally, while there are indications of an awareness that Islander falls into the larger language family of Caribbean English Creoles, with especially close ties to Jamaican Creole, this knowledge is not reflected in B’s product, which could have benefited from insights gained from the study of those languages (e.g. Don Winford’s substantial study Predication in Caribbean English Creoles (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993) which B seems unfamiliar with). Marsha Forbes and Silvia Kouwenberg University of the West Indies, Mona Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America