Verbs combine with other words to form verb phrases (VP), which are the heads of most clauses. A typical clause is a subject and a head VP. English verbs typically have more variety in their forms than other English words, reflecting grammatical categories like tense, person, and number, though these forms can sometimes look and sound the same. Most also have the secondary forms, namely gerund-participle, past participle, and plain form. A special group of verbs with distinctive properties is the auxiliary verbs, including the modal auxiliaries.

Semantically speaking, situations such as actions and states have perfective and imperfective interpretations, which are expressed in clauses and depend largely on the head verb, along with its tense and aspect. English has two past tenses (preterite & perfect), one present tense, and no future tense. The preterite and present are the primary tenses. There are two aspects, progressive and non-progressive. The modal auxiliaries specialize in expressing modality, which relates to how the possible situations described in a clause can reflect reality. There’s also a special irrealis form of be for expressing counterfactuals.

This chapter revisits the question of creole distinctiveness, i.e. the idea that creoles constitute a special type of language, not just historically but also structurally. It first sketches the two most influential proposals claiming creole uniqueness, i.e. Bickerton’s Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (1981) and McWhorter’s Creole Prototype (2005), and outlines some of the criticism that has been levelled against them. It then discusses the recent shift in research approaches from deductive to inductive, which represents an enormous progress in the understanding of creole distinctiveness while also raising new issues, such as sample size and bias as well as feature selection. The chapter then looks at how English-based pidgins and creoles can be separated from their lexifier. The comparison focuses on the expression of perfect, perfective, and other past-reference verb situations across a set of thirty English-lexifier pidgins, creoles, and other high-contact varieties, and the resulting variety clusters not only correlate with geographical distribution and sociohistorical evidence but also align easily with those described in other studies, both traditional and recent quantitative.