Since the paper by Jansen et al (1978), it is a well-known fact that serializing languages divide into two major groups: those which have Take-serial constructions and those which don’t. Haitian creole has Take-serial constructions, as exemplified in (l):

1. (1) Jan pran kabrit ale nan mache

2. John take goat go in market

3. ‘John brought the goat in the market.’

Among the languages which have Take-serial constructions, languages further divide into two groups: those which have instrumental Take constructions and those which do not. An example of an instrumental Take-serial construction is provided in (2). In these constructions, the subject of the second verb is interpreted as the instrument of the complex predicate formed by the series of verbs.

Métif is a language spoken in the Canadian prairie provinces and the American prairie states bordering Canada. There are probably between 3000 and 5000 people who speak Métif as their first language, most of them of advanced age. They are living mostly in scattered Métis settlements. The Métis are a nation of mixed Amerindian and European descent. From the 17th century on French Canadian fur traders and voyageurs travelled west-wards from French Canada. Many of them married Amerindian women, who were often Cree speaking. Around 1860 the Métis were the largest population group of the Canadian West, many of them multilinguals. From the first decades of the 19th century the Métis started to consider themselves as a separate ethnic group, neither European nor Amerindian (see e.g., Peterson and Brown 1985). The Métis are still a distinct people. The Métis nowadays often speak Cree, Ojibwa, Métif, French and English or a combination of these. They often speak particular varieties of these languages. Not only is the French spoken by the Métis markedly different from other North American French dialects the language called Métif is uniquely spoken among the Métis people. For more information on Métif and Métis languages, see the publications listed in Bakker (1989).

Substratal influences as an explanation for creolization (and language change generally) often fail to convince for one major reason, namely that, in most cases, the possible substratum for a given creole language is now separated from the site where creolization took place by a wide historical and geographical gap. This, for example, is the case of the West African languages vis-à-vis the Caribbean Creoles.