The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics

Chinese Pidgin English
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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