Introduction It is often believed that pidgins and creoles have no or very little morphology. Seuren and Wekker for example (1986:66) claim that "morphology [is] essentially alien to creole languages", and in Thomason (2001), a textbook on contact languages, one can read that "[m]ost pidgins and creoles either lack morphology entirely or have very limited mor- 2 phological resources compared with those of the lexifier and other input languages." (Thomason 2001:168, see Degraff 2001 for more discussion and more pertinent references) . Furthermore, it has been claimed that, if there is morphology in pidgins and creoles, it is (for the most part) regular, semantically transparent, iconic or otherwise unmarked (e.g. Seuren and Wekker 1986, McWhorter 1998, 2000, see also Thomason 2001:168). Most recently, there is a growing body of literature on pidgin and creole morphology in which these traditional views are seriously challenged (see, for example, the papers in Plag 2003a, 2003b, Kouwen

this paper, we will investigate these issues in more detail to shed new light on the nature of creole morphology and the role of morphology in creolization, using data from Early Sranan, an English-based creole language spoken in Suriname in the 18th and 19th centuries

The new millenium has seen a revival of the idea that processes of second language acquisition (SLA) are a crucial ingredient to creole genesis. Traditionally, the fields of SLA and pidgin and creole studies have cross-fertilized each other and there have been different periods in which one of the two fields eagerly looked at the results emerging in