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Negerhollands (or Virgin Islands Dutch Creole) is the extinct Dutchlexified creole of present-day US Virgin Islands. One of the typical features of Caribbean creoles is the occurrence of both, overtly marked and unmarked pasts. This has been attested in Negerhollands, where there is variation between preverbal (h)a and the bare verb. Studies in a number of creole languages have shown that such variation is not random. Following up on these results, I investigate the impact of factors such as narrative discourse function, aspect, and syntactic priming on the expression of past time reference in 20th-century Negerhollands through a quantitative variationist study. The results show that the factors conditioning past time reference marking in Negerhollands resemble those in other creole languages but with an entirely different outcome: Whereas other (English-lexified) creoles typically use unmarked pasts, Negerhollands typically uses overt pasts. This may reflect Akan substrate influence rather than being a sign of language death. *

There is a growing consensus that the varieties of Virgin Islands Dutch Creole (VIDC) -o en referred to as Negerhollands -should not be viewed as a single language, but rather as a language cluster of related varieties. However, there has been only limited systematic comparison of the varieties in the cluster as to their structural characteristics. We will try to ll this gap in this chapter by charting a speci c construction: the supra-locative prepositional phrases in two varieties of VIDC: the 20th century data recorded by Josselin de Jong and the variety in the 18th century religious texts. A systematic search in the VIDC data is possible because of the data base constructed for this language with the support of Clarin-NL. We will try to contrast the feature studied with those found in 17th century Dutch informal writings and in two relevant West-African languages: Akan and Ewegbe. The theoretical model used here derives from the notion of feature pool.

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