Abstract
Tis paper presents the first in-depth account of the bee copula form found in Belizean Kriol, which appears to be a copular development not found in other Caribbean English Creoles. Based on approximately 500 tokens of bee from Di Nyoo Testiment (2012), we argue that bee must appear in irrealis contexts. It is frequently used to mark a potential change of state, though this is not a conventional aspect of bee's meaning. We also show that while bee seems to be emphatic, this aspect of bee's meaning is best understood as derived via Gricean (1975) reasoning.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 323-349 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | English World-Wide |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Keywords
- Belizean Kriol
- Conversational implicature
- Copula
- Creole
- Emphatic
- Future
- Irrealis