This article attempts to reconstruct the plausible evolution of inflectional and free-standing morphemes in three historically related lusophone creoles (Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Creole, Papiamentu), and compares their morphological properties to Angolar, believed to have followed an independent developmental path. I examine their synchronic morphological properties and seek insights into their origins by studying Black speech in Portuguese 15th- and 16th-century literature. This reconstruction seeks to address several questions. Within the historically related creoles, is it possible to identify a set of formally and functionally common morphemes? If so, what is their source? Are they likely to have been inherited through diffusion? Are the common morphemes in the three related creoles distinct from those of Angolar or do they overlap?

This article is concerned with plural marking in two English-lexified creoles, Jamaican Patwa and Tok Pisin. In addition to bare plurals, these creoles possess two overt strategies of plural marking—a free-standing morpheme and the suffix -s. The analytic and inflectional plural markers occur according to different linguistic constraints. It appears that the creoles use two conceptually and typologically different number marking systems — that of set noun languages, based on the opposition between singleton and collective sets, and that of singular object noun languages, based on the opposition between singular and plural individuals. This poses problems for the definition of the lexical semantics of the creole nouns if one assumes the existence of cross-linguistic differences. The analysis proposed here is based on the universalist approach to lexical semantics. Under this approach, individuated and collective (set) interpretations of plurals are encoded in the noun phrase structure.

Most recent measures of morphological productivity are reliable only if they are based on a large corpus of the language. This article presents a detailed demonstration of a method for establishing an inventory of productive affixes in a language for which a large corpus is not available. This method evaluates the productivity of an affix first and foremost on the basis of its threshold of profitability (the number of different words derived via the affix) in correlation with other diagnostics to bolster reliability. These other diagnostics are the semantic and phonological transparency of derived words and the decomposability of such words. The application of the method is illustrated step-by-step with data from St. Lucian.

This article provides a description of complex patterns in which a verb combines with a morphologically invariable particle to form a single grammatical and phonological unit in Vincentian creole (VinC). English is replete with what grammars refer to as phrasal and prepositional verbs. Speakers of VinC also resort to these patterns which appear to have retained meanings from English. The combinations investigated testify to some measure of morphological change. Additionally, their semantic outcomes are treated as innovations to the extent that they have either not been attested in English or have degrees of compositionality that differ from those of English items. Arguably, such phrasal combinations are not typically considered relevant to word formation, given that they do not form a unitary element from a grammatical perspective. Evidence is provided to show that combinations of verbs and particles in [V+P]v can be analyzed as a product of compounding.