Copulas in Atlantic Creoles and Other Languages

In his first linguistics paper, Holm (1976) linked African American English (AAE) to the Atlantic creoles through the deletion rates of AAE copulas as described in Labov (1969, 1972) and then linked the copula pattern in the creoles to that of Yoruba, eventually convincing Labov (1982) of the validity of this link. Holm expanded his study of Atlantic creole copula patterns in his 1988 survey of creole syntactic features, adding to this patterns in non-Atlantic creoles in Holm et al. (1999) and Holm and Patrick, eds. (2007). Now, with the publication of the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures in 2013, the present study is able to offer the broadest perspective yet on this area of syntax that demonstrates that creole languages can be considerably more complex than their lexifiers. The article concludes by proposing new criteria for classifying the Atlantic creoles as a typological group.