Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) has been a key language in theoretical debates about the origins of creole languages. Bickerton (1977, 1981, 1984) pointed out that many grammatical features of HCE are similar to those of creoles that developed on plantations in other parts of the world, despite the fact that very different substrate languages were involved (e.g. African languages in the Atlantic region as opposed to Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese and Filipino languages in Hawai'i). However, the contact situations were similar in that children learning their first language on the plantations were exposed to a highly variable and undeveloped pre-pidgin. As this was not a fully developed language, the children had to fall back on their innate linguistic capacity to turn it into one. The similarity among HCE and other creoles is thus explained by universal characteristics of human linguistic endowment – Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH). Since the most comprehensive descriptions of important grammatical features of HCE have been from Bickerton himself, this new study of the language is a welcome contribution to the field.

This paper examines possessive marking in Pidgin Fijian as an example of morphological simplicity in a restricted pidgin. This is attributed to a process of simplification or lack of development in early second language acquisition. Here the only effect of the substrate languages appears to be in constituent ordering. The paper then goes on to look at morphological expansion in possessive marking in an expanded pidgin (or according to some, a creole): Melanesian Pidgin (MP). This is attributed to functional transfer from the substrate languages in extended second language use. While many core features of the Central Eastern Oceanic substrate are found in MP, the overt marking of alienable versus inalienable possession is not. One explanation is that this feature is "functionally expendable" or "inessential" in language (McWhorter 2002). However, the paper argues that the absence of formal marking of the alienable-inalienable distinction in MP can be best accounted for by availability constraints that prevented transfer of this feature at an earlier stage of development.

Our close friend and colleague Terry Crowley died suddenly at the age of 51 in January 2005 in his home in Hamilton, New Zealand, cutting short a brilliant and prolific career in linguistics. One common theme among the many tributes to Terry and the bittersweet reminiscing of his many friends around the world was that Terry never did things half way whether it was enjoying good food, going bush-walking, or doing linguistics. Just as he would eat a box of chocolates in one go, when he got the urge, he would sit down and write a journal article in a day or two. Just as he loved to visit friends in different countries, he revelled in doing linguistic fieldwork (and each year went off for a few months to Malakula in Vanuatu). To Terry, doing linguistics was another indulgence — even more important than eating "mega-disgusting desserts", as he called them. Therefore, we have tried to make this memorial volume for Terry a "linguistic indulgence" — including 35 studies by Terry's friends, colleagues and admirers, covering all of the types of languages he worked on: Australian, Oceanic, pidgins and creoles, and varieties of English.

In this thesis I describe aspects of referring expressions and referential practice in an English-lexified creole language spoken in the Ngukurr Aboriginal community, in the Northern Territory of Australia. Kriol has substrate influences from seven traditional Aboriginal languages. Dialects of Kriol are spoken in Aboriginal communities across the Top End of Australia; with estimates suggesting more than 20,000 people speak it as a first language. The language has a low status and in many contexts, such as health, medical and legal contexts, it frequently goes unrecognised as a legitimate language requiring interpreters. There is no comprehensive grammar of Kriol and as yet, there have been few in-depth studies into its structure and use. I investigate referential expressions in Kriol from various perspectives, using tools from a range of theoretical frameworks and research traditions, including descriptive linguistics, discourse analysis, information structure, and ethnopragmatics. The thesis provides an integrated description of how referential expressions are structured and how they are used in spontaneous talk to meet communicative needs. A further goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that there is significant continuity of referring strategies from Kriol's Aboriginal substrate languages. The data used in this study consists of a corpus of spontaneous discourse between two or more speakers, elicited material, and consultation with Elders on cultural issues relevant to language use. ... Each chapter contributes original description of the Kriol language. By combining a number of theoretical perspectives, the thesis offers an integrated description of the structure and function of referring expressions.

"Pidgin ranks right up there with ebonics. It's broken English. And when something is broken, you fix it." –-'Honolulu Star-Bulletin', 12/10/99. "For the benefit of Hawai'i children, pidgin should become a thing of the past... There are some things that deserve to die." –-'Honolulu Advertiser', 9/4/02. These quotations from letters to the editor reflect the common view that speaking a creole language – in this case, Hawai'i Creole, locally called "Pidgin" – is detrimental to students' progress in formal education. Such views have also been held by education department officials, as indicated by the following words spoken by Mitsugi Nakashima, Chairman of the Hawai'i State Board of Education: "If your thinking is not in standard English, it's hard for you to write in standard English. If you speak pidgin, you think pidgin, you write pidgin... We ought to have classrooms where standard English is the norm." -–'Honolulu Advertiser', 29/9/99. The statement was in reaction to the 1999 National Assessment of Educational Progress writing assessment, where only 15 percent of eighth graders from the state scored at or above proficient compared with 24 percent nationally. So, once again poor educational results were blamed not on misguided educational policies or underfunded public schools, but on the local creole language. And once again the solution was to ban the creole language from the classroom, and by implication, from the entire educational process.

Tok Pisin (or New Guinea Pidgin) is the dialect of Melanesian Pidgin spoken in Papua New Guinea. It serves as the main language of wider communication in a country where more than 800 separate indigenous languages are spoken by a population of nearly five million. The two other dialects of Melanesian Pidgin are Pijin, spoken in the Solomon Islands (with more than 80 indigenous languages and a population of around 480,000), and Bislama, spoken in Vanuatu (more than 100 languages, population 192,000). Torres Strait Creole (also known as Broken or Yumiplatok) - spoken by approximately 10,000 people around the northern tip of eastern Australia - is closely related to Melanesian Pidgin but is usually considered to be a separate language.

Looking up 'creolization' on any data base, or doing a search at amazon.com or simple googling the term will show that it is more widely used outside linguistics than inside – especially in anthropology, sociology, history and literary studies. Jourdan (2001: 2903) notes that the term has been borrowed from linguistics where one its definitions is the creation of a new language out of contact between at least two different languages. Creolization in the sociocultural context usually refers to the creation of new aspects of culture as a result of contact between different cultures. In this column, I present some background information on what I'll call 'sociocultural creolization' and its links with linguistic creolization. Then I describe what I see as some of the differences between the sociocultural and linguistic approaches. I conclude with implications of these differences for the field of creolistics.

Hawai'i Creole is spoken by an estimated 600,000 people in the US state of Hawai'i. In the linguistics literature, it is usually called Hawai'i (or Hawaiian) Creole English, but its speakers call it "Pidgin". While Hawai'i Creole uses many words from Hawaiian and other languages, the majority of its vocabulary comes from English; however, the phonology and semantics are quite different from English. Before describing the phonology of Hawai'i Creole, this chapter presents some background information on its historical development, current use, and vocabulary.

Our close friend and colleague Terry Crowley died suddenly at the age of 51 in January 2005 in his home in Hamilton, New Zealand, cutting short a brilliant and prolific career in linguistics. One common theme among the many tributes to Terry and the bittersweet reminiscing of his many friends around the world was that Terry never did things half way-whether it was enjoying good food, going bush-walking, or doing linguistics. Just as he would eat a box of chocolates in one go, when he got the urge, he would sit down and write a journal article in a day or two. Just as he loved to visit friends in different countries, he revelled in doing linguistic fieldwork (and each year went off for a few months to Malakula in Vanuatu). To Terry, doing linguistics was another indulgence even more important than eating "mega-disgusting desserts", as he called them. Therefore, we have tried to make this memorial volume for Terry a "linguistic indulgence"-including 35 studies by Terry's friends, colleagues and admirers, covering all of the types of languages he worked on: Australian, Oceanic, pidgins and creoles, and varieties of English.

The topic of this column is elaboration, following Syea’s (2002: 200) call for a reassessment of the term. After discussing what is meant by elaboration, and how it differs from restructuring, I concentrate on one aspect – morphological elaboration – and go into its sources and the processes that may be involved – especially language transfer. I conclude with some suggestions for further research.