Grammar
The tense/aspect system of Jamaican Patois is fundamentally unlike that of English. There are no morphological marked past tense forms corresponding to English -ed -t. There are two preverbial particles: en and a. These are not verbs, they are simply invariant particles that cannot stand alone like the English to be. Their function also differs from the English.
According to Bailey (1966), the progressive category is marked by /a~da~de/. Alleyne (1980) claims that /a~da/ marks the progressive and that the habitual aspect is unmarked but by its accompaniment with verbs like 'always', 'usually’, etc. (i.e. is absent as a grammatical category). Mufwene (1984) and Gibson and Levy (1984) propose a past-only habitual category marked by /juusta/ as in /weɹ wi juusta liv iz not az kuol az iiɹ/ ('where we used to live is not as cold as here')
For the present tense, an uninflected verb combining with an iterative adverb marks habitual meaning as in /tam aawez nuo kieti tel pan im/ ('Tom always knows when Katy tells/has told about him').
- en is a tense indicator
- a is an aspect marker
- (a) go is used to indicate the future
- /mi ɹon/
- I run (habitually); I ran
- /mi a ɹon/ or /mi de ɹon/
- I am running
- /a ɹon mi dida ɹon/ or /a ɹon mi ben(w)en a ɹon/
- I was running
- /mi did ɹon/ or /mi ben(w)en ɹon/
- I have run; I had run
- /mi a ɡo ɹon/
- I am going to run; I will run
Like other Caribbean Creoles (that is, Guyanese Creole and San Andrés-Providencia Creole; Sranan Tongo is excluded) /fi/ has a number of functions, including:
- Directional, dative, or benefactive preposition
- /dem a fait fi wi/ ('They are fighting for us')
- Genitive preposition (that is, marker of possession)
- /dat a fi mi buk/ ('that's my book')
- Modal auxiliary expressing obligation or futurity
- /im fi kom op ja/ ('he ought to come up here')
- Pre-infinitive complementizer
- /unu hafi kiip samtiŋ faɹ de ɡini piipl-dem fi biit dem miuzik/ ('you have to contribute something to the Guinean People for playing their music')
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