Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 19:2. 285-331 (2004).  John Benjamins B.V., Amsterdam Not to be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. ECHOES OF AFRICA: REDUPLICATION IN CARIBBEAN CREOLE AND NIGER-CONGO LANGUAGES 1 Silvia Kouwenberg University of the West Indies, Mona Darlene LaCharit´ e Laval University This paper considers whether specific reduplication processes in the English-lexified Creole languages of Jamaica and Suriname are due to sub- strate transfer by exploring the extent to which their formal, functional and selectional characteristics in those languages can be related to Niger-Congo (NC). The issue is discussed in the context of a theory of markedness and we propose that formal and semantic iconicity are among the criteria for evaluat- ing markedness in reduplication. According to markedness criteria, we identify deverbal noun reduplication and deverbal attribute formation, as they occur in Jamaican and the Suriname Creoles, and Jamaican X-like reduplication, as marked processes. Assuming that marked processes provide better evidence for substrate transfer, we searched for parallels for these specific processes in likely NC source languages. The best evidence for substrate transfer is found in stative adjective reduplication in the Suriname Creole languages, which finds a parallel in Gbe. The evidence for transfer from Gbe in the deverbal adjectives 1 We wish to thank audiences at the 3rd Biennial Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (University of Amsterdam, August 1999), at the 29th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (Leiden University, September 1999), and of the Linguistics Seminar of the University of Amsterdam Department of General Linguistics (December 1999) for their comments and suggestions on some of the ideas presented here. We also thank our anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful comments and helpful suggestions helped to sharpen our focus. Silvia Kouwenberg further wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), where a fellowship during 1999–2000 allowed her the time to do significant research towards this article. Darlene LaCharit´ e acknowledges a grant funded by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and awarded by the Faculty of Arts at Laval University that paid for travel to the Netherlands to facilitate joint work on this article.