Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Introduction: Creole Studies and Contact Linguistics -- Part 1. Setting the Scene -- The early history of Surinam: Why is Surinam different? -- Migrations, ethno-dynamics and geolinguistics in the Eastern Aja-Tado cultural Area -- Ingredient X: The shared African lexical element in the Englishlexifier Atlantic Creoles, and the theory of rapid creolization -- Relexification, and other language contact scenarios for explaining substrate effects -- Part II: Language structures: a sprachbund? -- Trans-Atlantic patterns: the relexification of locative constructions in Sranan -- Verb Semantics and Argument Structure in the Gbe and Sranan -- Morphology, cross-linguistic effects, and Creole formation -- Non-iconic reduplications in Eastern Gbe and Surinam -- Substrate phonology, superstrate phonology and adstrate phonology in creole languages -- The left periphery in the Surinamese creoles and Gbe: on the modularity of substrate transfer -- Relexification and clause-embedding predicates -- Part III. Wrapping up -- Conclusion: Feature distribution in the West Africa-Surinam Trans-Atlantic Sprachbund -- Bibliography of work resulting from the Trans-Atlantic Sprachbund project -- A preliminary list of probable Kikongo lexical items in the Surinam Creole languages -- A preliminary list of probable Gbe lexical items in the Surinam Creole languages -- References -- Indices