9308635 Winford Abstract Continuing debate about the structure of creole Tense/Modality/ Aspect (TMA) systems has emphasized the need for more precise and thorough analyses of particular creoles to elucidate issues such as the degree of similarity among creoles and their implications for theories of creolization. The longstanding view that creole verb complexes are organized around three core categories - Anterior (Tense), Irrealis (Mood) and Non-punctual (Aspect) - has come under increasing challenge in recent years, as our knowledge of these language has grown. This research focusses on the semantic and syntactic organization of the TMA systems of two Caribbean creoles - Belizean and Sranan (Suriname). The main purpose of the investigation is to test the extent to which the TMA systems of these creoles share a common organization and set of categories, and in what ways they conform to the so-called "prototypical" Creole TMA system which some scholars believe to owe its origin primarily to the influence of language universals in creole genesis and development. This is related to the broader hypothesis that creole grammar directly reflects Universal Grammar. The study will investigate the forms which encode the TMA categories of each creole, their characteristic distribution in various types of predicate structure, and their combinatory possibilities. The investigation will concentrate on the most conservative or "basilectal" variety of each creole. The data on which the analysis will be based will be collected from a sample of subjects in at least one rural community in each country using recordings of natural speech, and direct elicitation techniques, including questionnaires. The analysis will then be used to test the validity of claims concerning the uniformity of creole TMA systems and their implications for creole genesis.
