[…] many Europeans make the assumption that pidgins are just a special form of their own language. Most often they regard it as a debased and bastardized one.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.11

It is true that pidgins are ‘makeshift’ languages in the sense that they make do with a minimum of grammatical apparatus.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.13

One point of consensus reached by those who study pidgins is that they have a recognizable structure of their own independent of the substrate and superstrate languages involved in the original contact. The degree of stability of this structure varies, depending on the extent of internal development and functional expansion the pidgin has undergone at any particular point in its life cycle.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.13-14

A pidgin represents a language which has been stripped of everything but the bare essential necessary for communication. There are a few, if any, stylistic options . The emphasis is on the referential rather than the expressive function of language.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.24

[…] pidgins should be recognized as a special or limiting case of reduction in form resulting from restriction in use, since other varieties of language display similar properties, eg dying languages, second languages, koinés, etc […].
- Romaine (1988), a pag.24

The notion of simplicity is often invoked in the discussion of pidgins. In many popular accounts of pidgins simplicity is attributed to an alleged lack of grammar.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.31

It is widely believed in popular accounts that pidgins are inadequate for the expression of certain ideas and concepts.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.33

Since pidgins communicate only a referential minimum, it is to be expected that items which further specify others would fall out.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.34

Long-established languages are relatively more lexical, while pidgins, trade languages, second language learning varieties and child language are more grammatical. Pidgins have the properties of both lexical impoverishment and analytic structure.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.35

It is a direct consequence of their impoverished vocabulary that pidgins exhibit a high degree of motivation and transparency in compounding.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.36

Pidgins lack word formation rules with which to expand their lexicon. Although the use of the same lexical item in a number of grammatical functions constitutes again in simplicity, it also has the consequence that it violates the principle of one form equals one meaning.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.38

Some have defined a pidgin as a mixed language, which has the grammar of one language (the substrate) and the lexicon of another (the superstrate) […].
- Romaine (1988), a pag.44

A pidgin cannot be defined as simply the result of heavy borrowing from one variety into another since there is no pre-existing structure into which items may be borrowed.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.44

Pidgins by definition are generally used for restricted communicative purposes.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.46

[…] we should abandon any attempt to trace pidgins back to a single ancestor.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.100

[…] pidgins are articulated at a slow rate of delivery.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.138

[…] a pidgin is a second language for its speakers. The more basic the pidgin is, the more likely is that speakers will rely on strategies which maximize naturalness of encoding and decoding.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.138

In the earliest stages of its formation a pidgin is a rudimentary code which is used in certain limited communicative contexts, eg trade.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.151

[…] pidgins have tended to be defined negatively, eg restricted lexicon, absence of gender, absence of true tenses, absence of inflectional morphology, absence of relative clauses.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.228

Pidgins lack rules for embedding and subordination of clauses. They tend to use no formal marking to indicate that one part of an utterance is subordinate to another.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.241

[…] pidgins tend to use adverbial expressions placed sentence externally prior to developing tense marking as a verbal category.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.282

If we use Todd’s [Todd, L. 1974. Pidgins and Creoles. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.] definition of pidgin as a marginal language which arises to fulfil certain restricted communicative needs among people who have no common language, then pidgins are probably more generally the outcome of any situation of language contact.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.24

As Todd [Todd, L. (1974). Pidgins and Creoles. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ] says a pidgin is a nobody’s first language […].
- Romaine (1988), a pag.67