The creole language known as Hawaiian Pidgin is primarily an amalgam of English and ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (the language of the Native Hawaiian people) with further contributions from Okinawan and Spanish, among other East Asian and Romance languages. Hawaiian Pidgin grammar is distinguished by stative structures in which verbs modify subjects and serve a descriptive function comparable to that of adjectives, as in the statement “nice da stew” (nice the stew). Here, “nice” functions as a verb whose subject is “da stew,” such that the statement translates to “the stew is nice.” These structures suggest the influence of Okinawan and other East Asian languages that also abound in stative structures in which verbs assume a descriptive function.
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Verbal·Information and Ideas·Command of Evidence
hardWhich statement, if true, would most directly undermine the claim in the underlined sentence?
A
Verbs capable of modifying subjects by themselves are absent from most English dialects, which instead use copular verbs—forms of “to be” (the sky is cloudy) or other verbs that help express a state of existence (the sky looks cloudy)—to link subjects to the adjectives that modify them.
B
In Hawaiian Pidgin, a stative structure in which the verb precedes its subject is used for emphasis, while a structure in which the verb follows the subject (da stew nice) appears in unemphatic statements, and this sequence of verb and subject corresponds to that of stative structures in Okinawan and other East Asian languages.
C
Stative structures in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi often include an article equivalent to “the” in English, and their syntax corresponds to that of Hawaiian Pidgin stative structures, while Okinawan and other East Asian languages lack articles altogether.
D
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is one of the few US-based dialects of English with stative structures in which verbs modify subjects by themselves, but the syntax of those structures differs from that of Hawaiian Pidgin stative structures.