The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics

Shira Katseff
Ling 105
12 May 2006
Can spatial terms be inherited? The case of pidgin and creole languages
Introduction
Katseff Page Page numbers
An essential part of the human experience is hearing the sounds of the world through
human ears and seeing it through human eyes. And because our sensory organs are
morphologically similar, one might imagine that we would come to talk about sensory
experiences in the same way.
But this is not so. A systematic research program by Berlin, Kay, and their colleagues has
shown that although we all see the same colors, different languages split the color
spectrum along different lines. Languages can have two color terms or ten, with a
selection of wavelengths as foci. But in spite of this diversity, color designations are not
completely random. There are some focal colors that are more likely to be prototypes
than others, and there is a fairly tight hierarchy of color terms. That is, all languages with
two color terms name one for warm colors (e.g., white, yellow, and red) and one for cool
colors (e.g., blue, green, black), and those that add a third color term universally split the
warm term into one for white and one for yellow/red.
Is the same true of more abstracted concepts in the visual domain? One well-studied area
of research is that of spatial relations, words that express concepts like on, under, in back
of, or to the right of. Initial research has shown that, parallel to the case of color terms,
different languages have different numbers of words to talk about space. Some languages

Katseff Page Page numbers
(like Spanish) have a single word en that covers relations that in English would use on or
in, while others have finer distinctions than English. Dutch, for one, has two different
types of on and two types of in.
But the similarities end there. Spatial terms are otherwise quite different from color
terms. There have been attempts to create an implicational hierarchy for spatial terms
(for a thorough review of these, see Levinson et al 2003). The implicit argument is that
some spatial terms are more basic than others, and there is a set order of evolution for
these terms. By this reasoning, in order to have a word for X (e.g., on), a language must
also have a word for Y (e.g., at), even if there is nothing in the meaning of either word
requiring this.
These larger scale efforts to categorize the semantics of spatial expressions have largely
failed. The most expansive attempt thus far is a project conducted by Steve Levinson and
his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute. They are collecting spatial terms from a large
sample of languages. The group has made several attempts to extract some regularity
from the situations that individual prepositions describe. They hypothesize that with the
right analysis, a pattern indicating the most basic use of in or under would emerge.
However, no clear patterns have been found. It is still possible that there is regularity to
assignment of spatial terms, and the problem is that situations are categorized for this
purpose using a scheme that we have not yet uncovered. However, this implies that this
categorization is neither intuitive nor salient, a result that would be troublesome to many
linguists. Conservatively, then, this result indicates that spatial terms are assigned in an

Katseff Page Page numbers
ungeneralizable, language-specific way. Significantly, this predicts that spatial terms
should not be transferable between languages (no borrowing).
One interesting corollary of this result is that there is a critical period for learning spatial
terms. In a seminal paper, Bowerman (1996) report on expressing spatial relations in
Korean and English. These two languages go about this task very differently. Aside from
gross differences – Korean uses verbs, while English uses nouns – there are many
semantic distinctions as well. For example, Korean distinguishes terms based on method
of attachment. Yet children tend to acquire their native language's conception of spatial
relations before the age of two, regardless of the language.
Importantly, these terms, so easy to pick up in childhood, are very difficult to master as
adults. Even intuitively, this conclusion seems obvious: one of the easiest ways to
identify a non-native speaker of one's language is to listen to their preposition use;
prepositions are one of the areas of language mastered last, and often is never learned
completely. A striking example of this is found in Sierra Leone Krio, a creole language
which, for reasons that will be explained in the next section, has borrowed extensively
from English. Among these borrowings are 91 idiomatic expressions derived from
English 'in' or 'in the', e.g., in ven 'in vein', in trObul 'in trouble', in raytin 'in writing'.
Remarkably, Sierra Leone Krio does not use 'in' to denote spatial relations. 'In' is not
even a preposition in this language (Fyle and Jones 1980)! Each of these 91 expressions
were borrowed holistically as frozen forms. This indicates that (adult) learners of this
language, though exposed to English, were unable to extract the myriad semantic

dimensions of English 'in' from its usage.
Katseff Page Page numbers
This difficulty in learning L2 prepositions is present in more standard languages as well.
A test of adults learning Arabic in the classroom showed that their mastery of
prepositions was quite poor, even for more advanced learners
(http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol38/no3/p26.htm). Although the use of
prepositions is systematic, the system is hard to learn, perhaps because it is not explicitly
obvious to language users.
In the context of standard languages, these adult learners leave scarcely a footprint: their
speech is considered accented or aberrant and is not incorporated into the language. But
there is in fact a context where these imperfectly learned semantic fields are incorporated
into the standard language: pidgins and creoles.
Pidgins and Creoles
To understand the relevance of pidgins and creoles to a typology of spatial semantics, a
few short definitions are in order. A pidgin is the language that arises when groups of
people from diverse language backgrounds are forced to interact for some limited
purpose. In one common scenario, pidgins arose when large groups of slaves were taken
to plantations and required to communicate with each other and with their owners.
Creoles are like pidgins, but more complete. By one definition, they are used in more
discourse contexts than pidgins. In another, they are the language that results when kids
learn and regularize a pidgin (McWhorter 2000).

Katseff Page Page numbers
Many who research pidgins and creoles believe that in witnessing a language as it is
being created, they can gain some insight into language genesis. It is thought that, since
pidgins are built from scratch by people with no common language, it would be
surprising and telling if the languages they created had similar features. For example, if
these new, unrelated languages all over the world share SVO word order, then perhaps
there is something cognitively basic about SVO as opposed to other word orders. This
particular hypothesis has been thoroughly disproven (McWhorter 2000), but similar lines
of research are still being pursued. In this spirit, many research programs have focused
on word order and morphological markers in in pidgins. There are plenty of other
reasons that various grammatical elements might be represented in unrelated pidgins.
The most obvious of these is that many of them use the same (or same set of) superstrate
languages, which means that different pidgins may not be as different as we think.
In spite of these difficulties, it would be interesting to note whether spatial terms,
representative of a sensory activity turned linguistic, share similar categorizations across
pidgins. These parallels would be all the more striking if the way they carve up space is
different from either parent language.
A Hypothesis
If pidgins are indeed formed and used primarily among adults with different spatial
language backgrounds, it should be difficult to agree on a common spatial system. Thus
the set of words to describe spatial relations in a creole should be very small (a highly

impoverished system).
Katseff Page Page numbers
Once child learners enter the mix, there is potential for the spatial system to grow on its
own. Thus creoles should have a larger and more complex system for describing spatial
relations. Importantly, this system should not be expected to conform to that of any
parent language.
To investigate this hypothesis, I turned to a set of four languages, two pidgins and two
creoles. These languages were chosen to reflect a diversity of geographical regions and
lexifier (superstratum) languages. Detailed analyses of spatial terms in these languages,
Berbice Dutch Creole, Mauritian Creole, Tok Pisin, and Chinese Pidgin English, are
conducted below.
Results
Berbice Dutch Creole
Berbice Dutch Creole is of interest because it is the only extant creole with Dutch as
superstrate language. Little is known about its history. Originally spoken in the Dutch
colony of Berbice, sociolinguistic factors caused the language community to diminish in
size after transfer of the colony to the British (Kouwenberg, 1994:1). A very small
number of texts from the 18 th century document this language, but it is not clear how
much before this the language had been spoken.
Linguistically, its origins are clearer. The lexifier is unambiguously Dutch. The main

Katseff Page Page numbers
substratum language is Ijo, a west African language group whose nine languages are
spoken by about two million people. A series of historical accidents allowed the language
to survive through the twentieth century, but as of 1990, the latest date for which I could
find accurate data, there were only three known speakers remaining. In addition, then, to
being a typologically rare language, it is also a highly endangered (if not extinct) one.
To get an idea of how Berbice Dutch Creole (henceforth BDC) speakers used spatial
vocabulary, I looked at about 100 descriptions of spatial locations culled from texts.
These texts consisted of stories recorded between 1986 and 1990 from a variety of elderly
speakers of the language. Topics ranged widely from memories to folktales to small talk.
Spatial descriptions in these texts were coded for the Berbice Dutch Creole preposition
used and its English equivalent.
It is worth noting briefly that Berbice Dutch Crole has both prepositions and
postpositions, but that all of the spatial relations of interest are expressed with
postpositions.
Berbice Dutch Creole Postposition English Preposition(s)
anga / hogang in
atr ɛ / atr ə / atri
after, back, behind, following
ben in, inside, into, on, (no equivalent)
bof head, on, on top, top
bofu up, upriver
faro ahead
for before, front, in front, over

Katseff Page Page numbers
Berbice Dutch Creole Postposition English Preposition(s)
jenda in
kandi near, to the side of, over
ofro across, over
ondro under
tosn between, in
Table 1. Berbice Dutch Creole prepositions and their English equivalents.
Various other categories were recorded as well, but they are excluded from the above
table for clarity.
Two observations are immediately clear from the chart. First, BDC has an expansive and
well-developed set of spatial vocabulary items. Second, BDC spatial propositions and
English spatial prepositions are divided very differently. This, of course, is a trivial
finding; while possible that BDC prepositions might align more closely with the
superstrate language, Dutch, there is no reason to expect BDC prepositions to overlap in
any systematic way with English.
It is difficult to know (without enlisting the aid of a native Dutch speaker) which
prepositions are used in each of the sentences in my corpus. As an approximation, I
turned to the Levinson et al survey, which included Dutch spatial expressions.

Characteristics of interest are summarized below:
Katseff Page Page numbers
number adpositions: more than 50; more than 15 are basic spatial terms
number spatial nominals: more than 10 important terms
locative case: none
positional/locative verbs: 4 (sit, stand, lie, hang)
fine distinctions: two types of in and on
(adapted from Levinson et al 2003)
Globally, the number of basic spatial terms approaches that of Dutch (12 in BDC; about
15-20 in Dutch). However, this is not a powerful criterion: many other, unrelated
languages also have this property. BDC is more rare typologically in that it, like Dutch,
has both pre- and postpositions. However, Dutch spatial relations are always expressed
with prepositions. Postpositions are reserved for more figurative meanings (angry with,
excited about). A short list of Dutch prepositions follow, along with their English
equivalents.
Dutch preposition English equivalent(s)
a to, at
aan on, at
achter behind, after
beneden beneath, under
bij by, near, at
binnen within, in
boven above, over
buiten out of, outside, beyond
door through, by
in in, into
langs along, past
met with
naast next to

Dutch preposition English equivalent(s)
om around, for
onder under, beneath
op on
over over, via, about
rond, rondom around
te at, in
tegen against
tegenover opposite
tussen between, among
uit out, out of, from
vóór before, in front of
voorbij past, beyond
Table 2. Dutch prepositions and their English equivalents
Katseff Page Page numbers
Notably, the semantics of these two sets of spatial terms are quite different. To see this,
let us highlight a few pairs of adpositions. First, BDC has a postposition with the
meaning of top/head of creek, while Dutch lacks an equivalent preposition. Additionally,
BDC mainly groups the English concepts of in and on in a single category; this contrasts
sharply with Dutch, which has fine distinctions in this area. Another significant
difference between BDC and Dutch is the close connection of spatial terms to body parts
in BDC. The word atrɛ 'after, back, behind, following' is used prototypically to describe
an animal's back or the back of an arrow. By extension, it is also used to mean 'in view of
someone's back', i.e., following. The spatial analogue of atrɛ is 'behind'. Similarly, for
'before, front, in front, over' can be used to describe a person's forehead and and bow of a
ship. Metaphorically, these terms can be extended to express more abstract spatial
relations: in front of or far ahead in one's line of sight (over).
As mentioned earlier, the substratum languages with the greatest influence on BDC are

Katseff Page Page numbers
the Ijo languages of West Africa. A limited reader on Izon, an Ijo language spoken in
Nigeria, indicates that its spatial relations are expressed with postpositions:
Dengi yó ko? (contraction of dengi yó ki gho) 'where' (literally, 'which place in?')
Bŭroubóo - Bŭroubí gho 'on the fire(place)'
Structurally, BDC parallels Izon in its used of spatial terms. Like Izon, BDC uses
postpositions. The inventory of Izon spatial terms, however, seems to be much more
limited than either Dutch or BDC. The reader states that gho can be used to express 'at,
in, or on' (Egberipou and Williamson 1994:36). If true and representative of the Ijo
language family as a hole, the size of BDC's spatial term inventory is different from both
Izon and Dutch. Coupled with the evidence that the semantics of these terms in BDC is
different from both Izon and Dutch, it is plausible to conjecture that spatial expressions in
Berbice Dutch Creole do not resemble those of any parent languages.
Mauritian Creole
Mauritian Creole, also known as Kreol, is spoken on the island of Mauritius. It is the
most commonly spoken language on the island and the lingua franca. Though discovered
separately by the Portuguese, Dutch, and possibly Arabic and Malay groups, there was no
serious attempt to settle the island until the French East India Company arrived in 1715
(Baker 1972:5). From 1715 to 1810, Mauritius was populated by the French, Muslims
from western India, and slaves from Bourbon Island (Réunion), Mozambique, and

Katseff Page Page numbers
Madagascar. The British overtook the island in 1810, established English as the official
language, and emancipated the slaves in 1833. The emancipation resulted in a labor
shortage which brought in a wave of immigration from India, followed by Chinese
immigration after 1890.
The sociolinguistics history of these groups is rich and complex, and is unfortunately
beyond the scope of this paper. Most relevant to the project at hand is a compilation by
Baker of eighteen languages which he considers to be viable mother tongues on
Mauritius: Bengali, Bhojpuri, Cantonese, English, French, Gujerati, Hakka, Hindi,
Hindustani, Kokni, Kreol, Kutchi, Mandarin, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telegu, and Urdu.
Before attempting to compare to any of these languages to Mauritian Creole, let us
examine its selection of spatial prepositions:
Mauritian Creole Preposition English preposition(s)
ah in
ahbah inside
ahdah inside
ar with, in
dah at, in, on, to
kot at, beside
ladah in
lao above
latet top
lor on
Table 3: Spatial prepositions in Mauritian Creole and their English equivalents.

Katseff Page Page numbers
There is some similarity between Mauritian Creole spatial terms and their English
equivalents, but the two systems are ultimately quite different. English does not have a
single term corresponding well to Mauritian Creole dah 'at, in, on, to', or latet 'top', nor
does it assign lor 'on' to the same types of relations (most saliently, lor does not cover
attachment).
Too many substrate languages were relevant to the formation of Mauritian Creole to lay
them all out here in detail, but none of them appear to have systems very close or
identical to that of Mauritian Creole. Hindi and Mandarin both use postpositions rather
than prepositions, and Hindi expresses some spatial relations using a system of possessive
plus a nominal. Thus, like Berbice Dutch Creole, Mauritian Creole has created a unique
spatial system of its own.
Tok Pisin
There is no consensus on when Tok Pisin (also called Melanesian Pidgin) arose as a
language. Europeans started to visit the New Guinea region in large numbers at the
beginning of the 1800s as the area became known for its whales, sandalwood, and beche-
la-mer. Trade was nearly stymied by the lack of a common language; whereas previously
it was possible to learn a single local language and use it as a medium of communication,
the linguistic diversity of Papua New Guinea made choosing a single indigenous
language impossible. Consequently English words were used instead. This common

Katseff Page Page numbers
language came in handy at the end of the 1800s, when groups of people from Vanuatu,
the Solomon Islands, and eventually, Papua New Guinea were taken to work on large
plantations in Queensland. When these plantation workers returned, Melanesians realized
that this language could be of use as a lingua franca, and Tok Pisin developed and spread.
(Siegel)
Today, Tok Pisin is used as a medium of communication between speakers of English and
speakers of various Melanesian and Papuan languages in New Guinea, the Bismarck
Archipelago and neighboring island groups, and the Solomon Islands. It is considered an
“expanded pidgin”. Like a pidgin, the great majority of its speakers do not learn Tok
Pisin as their first language, but functionally and grammatically, it is more like a creole,
and there do exist thousands of native speakers. Tok Pisin is currently the national
language of Papua New Guinea 1 and boasts more than two million speakers there.
As a result of this history, major influences on Tok Pisin come from English, German,
and Malay, as well as Samoan and local island languages. Of the many substratum
languages that have contributed to the formation of Tok Pisin, Tolai has received the
most attention.
Data for Tok Pisin spatial terms came from a compilation of texts from letters, stories,
and books ranging over a 80 year period. This is particularly valuable because it is
possible to observe both the current use of spatial terms in this language and the
1 Actually, there are three national languages: Tok Pisin, English, and Hiri Motu

Katseff Page Page numbers
development of this system over time. Indeed, at the time of the first texts (1913), Tok
Pisin was a fairly new language and was much less developed. The following chart
observes words to describe spatial relations in Tok Pisin. Data is presented in two stages,
an old (pre-1950) stage and a new (post-1950) stage.
Old prepositions
Only the word long and variants (lo, log) were used. Variants seemed to be particular to a
speaker's idiolect or perhaps predated long. The semantics of all three seem to be
identical.
Some examples
Tok Pisin He got plenty kakaruk long place.
Translation There are plenty of chickens in the village.
Tok Pisin Jupela i sindaon long giraon na jupela i rait.
Translation Sit down on the ground and write.
New prepositions (after 1970):
Tok Pisin preposition English equivalent(s)
ananit under/underneath
antap / antap long on top, around, up high, over
daun / daun long down
insait in, inside
long after, along, in. on, over

Tok Pisin preposition English equivalent(s)
wantaim added to, mixed in
klostu nearby
Table 4. Tok Pisin prepositions and their English equivalents
Katseff Page Page numbers
It is dangerous to make broad speculations about Tok Pisin from this chart. Absence of
some spatial relations in the examples I came across does not definitively show that they
are absent in the language. (But if they exist, they are infrequent.)
Typical example:
Tok Pisin Autim praipan na larim samis wantaim krim
Translation Take out frypan and let sandwich together cream
Tok Pisin (whiped) na rabim ais suga antap long en.
Translation (whipped) and run ice sugar on top of it.
Free translation: Remove the tins and let the sandwich cool. Put the two halves together
with cream (whipped) and cover the top with icing sugar.
It is possible with this limited data set, however, to compare Tok Pisin spatial expressions
with their counterparts in English and relevant substrate languages.
Many languages of Papua New Guinea and the surrounding area were certainly
instrumental in the formation of Tok Pisin. The most celebrated example, as mentioned

Katseff Page Page numbers
earlier, is Tolai (or Kuanua), spoken on the island of New Britain by about 61,000 people
(Tolai, Ethnologue). Tolai's spatial terms follow:
Tolai expression English equivalent(s)
kan ra from, out of
ta ra in, onto, from (the store), in, through
navavai under
paparai beside
namur behind
vana ngaina in line with
Table 5. Tolai spatial expressions and their English equivalents.
Beyond those listed above, there are two other languages in this area where space has
been explicitly investigated.
1. Yélî Dnye.
This language was investigated for the way it expressed spatial relations in 71 spatial
relations depicted with line drawings. A typological summary of its spatial terms follows
(adapted from Levinson et al 2003):
number adpositions: more than 50; more than 25 are basic spatial terms
number spatial nominals: 3-5 less important terms
locative case: none
positional/locative verbs: 3 (sit, stand, hang)
fine distinctions: unusual distinctions, e.g. 'attached by spiking'

2. Kilivila.
Katseff Page Page numbers
In a task in which participants were asked to describe a picture to a partner, speakers of
Kilivila used an intrinsic system. These pictures displayed a man in various
configurations relative to a tree (e.g., tree on right/man on left, tree on left/man on right,
man in front of tree on left). Kilivila participants always took the role of the man and
described the tree as being at the man's chest, back, etc. Importantly, this system gives
underspecified descriptions: a picture in which the man is on the left facing a tree on the
right has the same description as a picture in which the man is on the right facing a tree
on the left. Both are described as “tree at the man's chest”. (Pederson et al 1998)
3. Longgo
One other nearby language, Longgo, spoken on the Solomon Islands, uses “local nouns”
meaning behind, in front, inside, beside, under/beneath, on/above, and in the center
(Senft, ed. 1997: 104). However, in most situations, Longgo uses absolute directions
(north/south/east/west) to describe the locations of objects.
Importantly, there is no indication of an intrinsic spatial system in Tok Pisin, nor of the
unusual spatial semantics of Yélî Dnye.
Structurally, Papuan and Austronesian languages express spatial locations in a variety of
ways. Some, like Takia and Waskia, use postpositions, while others have prepositions or,
like Wedau and Tawala, place prepositions in the middle of the phrase. Notably, the
language Gedaged has a postposition lon, meaning 'in'.

Chinese Pidgin English
Katseff Page Page numbers
It was very difficult to collect texts for pidgin data, and this section is written based on a
series of short stories from (cite).
It contains several spatial prepositions: inside (in) lound (around), outside (out from),
top-side (in, on):
There were not enough contexts in my sample to determine how extensive the spatial
system is in this pidgin. But however big it is, the system certainly more larger than in
old Tok Pisin, which contained only a single term. The few terms that did appear in the
corpus do not correspond exactly with their English counterparts. inside tends to refer to
emotions (happy inside) rather than places. The general term side seems to be used to
express presence at a location (e.g., China-side 'in China').
Though the semantics of Chinese Pidgin English spatial terms are a poor fit to their
English counterparts, the structure is fairly similar to English. Mandarin, on the other
hand, is structurally quite different, as it uses postpositions rather than prepositions. But
Mandarin semantics may be much closer: it has postpositions meaning above/on,
below/under, in(side), out(side), behind, in front (of), opposite, aside/near, between, at
this side, at that side, left, right, north, south, east and west (Specifying location in
Mandarin Chinese). In particular, the use of Chinese Pidgin English top-side to refer to
both to 'on top of the water' and 'above/over the mountain' is consistent with the spatial

Katseff Page Page numbers
semantics of Mandarin. It is even possible that the use of side as a general location
marker is a calque from Mandarin.
Conclusions
Modern “expanded pidgins” and creoles have a full-sized selection of spatial terms.
However, these terms seem to differ both from those of the lexifier language and from the
substrate languages. Typologically, there are no clear universals to these terms: some, but
not all, make use of body parts to express 'in front of' and 'behind', and some, but not all,
use prepositions rather than postpositions to talk about space. Some, but not all, have a
generalized term to express proximity without direction.
Pidgin data was inconclusive. It is perhaps significant that old Tok Pisin only used one
word, log/long, to cover all spatial relations. The hypothesis would predict, in fact, that
this pattern would be typical of pidgins. If true, one good explanation is that pidgins,
innovated by adults, created a minimal system of spatial terms that was later expanded as
discourse contexts increased and children acquired the language. L2 learners do structure
languages differently and can leave their mark on a natural language.
However, there was no evidence that Chinese Pidgin English significantly restructured
their spatial semantics to accommodate English speakers. While possible that this is a
counterexample to the L2 learner hypothesis, this effect would also be expected if
Chinese Pidgin English was learned only by Chinese speakers for the purpose of

Katseff Page Page numbers
communicating with English speakers. Because the pidgin did not need to be learned by
people of diverse linguistic background, it would not be necessary for them to talk about
space differently.
Inasmuch as words for spatial relations are indicative of cognitive structure, our learned,
language-specific categories for space have a profound effect on how we approach, learn,
and innovate language.
A final note
The pidginlike processes of syntactic simplification is not unique to pidgins and creoles.
Such processes are in fact found in other locations with extensive linguistic diversity and
longstanding contact, as in New Guinean languages. Before and beside Tok Pisin, groups
without a common language in neighboring villages have modified their languages to
encourage better communication. In a process which Thurston (1989) calls exoterogeny,
a language used by groups with different language backgrounds diverge from the parent
language in order to be more learnable (Ross 1996). Such a process could have been at
work in creating a new set of spatial terms.

References
Katseff Page Page numbers
Baker, Philip. Kreol: A Description of Mauritian Creole. London: C. Hurst & Company,
1972.
Bisang, Walter. Das Chinesische Pidgin-Englisch: Ein Bilinguales Pidgin. Im
Spannungsfeld von Superstrt, Substrat und Eigener Kreativitat. Amsterdam Asia
Studies No. 58. University of Amsterdam, 1985.
Bowerman, Melissa. 1996. Learning how to structure space for language: A
crosslinguistic perspective. Chapter 10 of Language and Space, eds. Paul Bloom,
Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill F. Garrett. Cambridge MA: MIT
Press. 383-436.
Bowerman, Melissa and Soonja Choi. 2001. In: M. Bowerman and S.C. Levinson, eds.
Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 475-511.
Egberipou, O.A. and Williamson, Kay. 1994. Learn Izon. Port Harcourt, Nigeria:
Riverside Communications.
Donaldson, Bruce. 1997. Dutch: A Comprehensive Grammar. New York: Routledge.
Fyle, Clifford and Eldred Jones. A Krio-English Dictionary. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980.
Hall, Robert A. Melanesian Pidgin English: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary. Linguistic
Society of America, 1943.
Kouwenberg, Silvia. 1994. A Grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Kouwenberg, Silvia. 2000. Loss in Berbice Dutch Creole negative constructions.
Linguistics 38(5), 889-923.
Lakkis, Khadija and Mirna Abdel Malak. Understanding the Transfer of Prepositions:
Arabic to English. Language & Life Sciences, English Teaching Forum: 38(3).
Online: http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol38/no3/p26.htm
Majid, Asifa, Melissa Bowerman, Sotaro Kita, Daniel B.M. Haun, and Stephen C.
Levinson. 2004. Can language restructure cognition? The case for space.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 8(3) 108-114.
McWhorter, John. 2000. The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering Birth of Plantation.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Narasimhan, Bhuvana, and Gaby Cablitz. 2002. Granularity in the crosslinguistic
encoding of motion and location. Talk given at Workshop on Language and
Space, University of Bielefeld, July 8-9.
Pederson, Eric, Eve Danziger, David Wilkins, Stephen Levinson, Sotaro Kita, Gunter
Senft. 1998. Semantic Typology and Spatial Conceptualization. Language 74(3),
557-589.
Ross, Malcolm D. 1996. Contact-induced Change and the Comparative Method: cases
from Papua New Guiea. In Mark Durie and Malcolm D. Ross, eds., The
comparative method reviewed: regularity and irregularity in language change.
New York: Oxford University Press, 180-217.
Senft, Gunter, ed. Referring to Space: Studies in Austronesian and Papuan Languages.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Katseff Page Page numbers
Siegel, Jeff. Tok Pisin. School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics. University of
New England. Online: http://www.une.edu.au/langnet/tokpisin.htm.
Specifying Location in Mandarin Chinese.
http://home.unilang.org/wiki3/index.php/Specifying_Location_in_Mandarin_Chinese.
Thurston, W. R. 1989. How exoteric languages build a lexicon; Esoterogeny in West
New Britain. In R. Harlow and RF. Hooper, eds., VICAL I, Oceanic languages:
Papers from the Fifth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics 555-
79. Linguistic Society of New Zealand, Auckland.
Tolai. In Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed., 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World,
Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version:
http://www.ethnologue.com/.

Katseff Page Page numbers
A detailed gloss for a particularly spatial sentence follows:
Mauritian Creole: Saken ena en but ahtere dah later pu form en
Gloss: Each-one have one end buried in earth for form one
Mauritian Creole: triyahg e lot but zwen ahsam lao.
Gloss: triangle and other end meet together above.
Free translation: One end of each bar was stuck in the ground equidistant from the other
two while the tops of the bars met together a few feet above the ground.