ABSTRACTS
Dany Adone (Heinrich-Heine-Universität) 2C, Thursday 2.30
Conceptual categories in a
French-based creole
The
lexicon is defined as the store of idiosyncratic information in long-term
memory from which the mental grammar constructs phrases and sentences. A
lexical item is regarded as a combination of long-term memory of phonological,
syntactic and semantic and conceptual features. A close look at verbs in a
language shows us the possible ways humans and other entities are described to
interact with each other. In this paper I will analyze certain verb
combinations in Morisyen and their relevance to the discussion of universality
of semantic patterns (especially argument structure).
Talmy (1985) argues that languages have preferences in the way they combine units of meaning, such as movement, manner, direction. Conflation describes a situation in which “a set of meaning components, bearing particular relation to each other, is in association with a morpheme, making up the whole of the morpheme's meaning.” There is a basic set of ‘conceptual or ontological categories’ such as THING, EVENT, STATE, PATH and a set of combinatorial rules that conflate them into more complex concepts. The functions GO; THING; PATH may be conflated into EVENT as in: EVENT à [Event GO (THING, PATH)] where the event comprises GO, a function which relates a THING moving along a PATH.
Semantic structure and its effect on syntax can be illustrated with examples of the meaning component GO conflated with MANNER as is the case with ‘dance’ in English. This is not the case in Morisyen:
(1) a. Maria danced into
the living room.
b. Maria est entrée dans
le salon en dansant.
c. Maria ti danse rant dan
salon.
‘Maria danced came into the living room.’
In
(1a) the English example illustrates that Maria moves into the room in a
dancing fashion. In French, the same action requires en dansant ‘in dancing’. In Moriysen a resultative
construction (danse-rantre) is
required. Further the sentences below show that both French and Morisyen cannot
conflate MANNER with the meaning component GO because they do not have any
directional interpretation:
(2) a. Maria
a dancé dans le salon.
‘Maria
danced inside the living room.’
b. Maria
ti dans dan salon.
‘Maria
danced inside the living room’
Similarly verbs such as sorti, vini in Morisyen behave differently from the lexifier French sortir, venir. The meaning GO cannot be conflated with PATH in Morisyen:
(3) a. Sean
est sorti de la chambre.
‘Sean went out of the room.’
b. Sean ti sorti dan
pies la in ale.
‘Sean came out of the room went away.’
Sortir which means ‘exit’ in French already
contains the meaning ‘out’. As a result, sortir is expressed with a neutral preposition. Morisyen
uses dan ‘in’ which
has a locative character. Without dan
the sentence is ungrammatical.
This means that the meaning component GO cannot be conflated in sorti and consequently has to be expressed separately as ale. I argue that Morisyen and possibly some other Creoles, do not conflate MANNER and PATH with the meaning component GO and thus contrasts with both English and French.
Dany Adone
(Heinrich-Heine-Universität) 7C, Saturday 4.00
Reduplication in creole and sign languages
A
close look at both Creole languages and Sign languages (emergent or established
ones) reveals some striking similarities between these two groups of languages.
With respect to sign languages I will focus on American Sign Language (ASL)
(Newkirk 1999), British Sign Language (BSL) (Sutton-Spence and Woll 1999), as
well as German Sign Language (DGS) (Boyes-Braem 1990, Perniss 2000 ms.) as
established sign languages. Under emerging sign language I understand the case
of Nicaragua Sign Language (NSL) (cf. Senghas 1995, Senghas et al. 1997, Kegl
2002 among others.) One of them is the phenomenon of reduplication.
In this paper reduplication is understood as a morphological process of word repetition (repetition of parts of words) to form new words with different meanings. The process is seen as productive and applies to many members of a word class and can even lead to alteration of word class.
First, I discuss the theoretical importance of different types of reduplication such as full and partial reduplication. I also analyze what part of the base (final reduplication, medial reduplication) is reduplicated. Second, I discuss the various patterns of reduplication in both Creole and Sign languages and the issue of iconicity related to partial reduplication (cf. . According to Bakker and Parkvall (conference paper 2002) it seems that English-based Creoles have more reduplication than the French-based Creoles. Third, I focus on the function of reduplication in both language groups. I find reduplication with verbs, nouns and adjectives. Reduplication of verbs has the function of aspectual marking (continued or repeated). Nominal reduplication is used for plurality, collectivity and distribution. Reduplicated adjectives are used for intensity (very X) or decrease (less X). Reduplicated numerals are also witnessed in some creole and sign languages.
Finally I argue that the similarities found with respect to forms and functions of reduplication in these two language groups can be explained by the fact that these two language groups are younger languages. From the point of view of language contact, I conclude that both universal and substrate features play a role here in Creole languages. This comparative study can be seen as a first attempt to shed light on the role of reduplication in language genesis, and contact.
Jacques Arends (University
of Amsterdam) 4C, Friday 10.30
On the use of ‘language analysis’ in
asylum applications made by West Africans in the Netherlands
In
deciding on applications for asylum, the Dutch Immigration Department bases
itself, among other things, on so-called ‘language analyses’.
Contrary to what one would expect, these ‘analyses’ are performed
by lay persons – (native) speakers of the language(s) concerned - not by
professional linguists. While this practice in itself is open to critique, it is
all the more problematic in the case of asylum seekers originating from West
Africa, especially those areas where language varieties are spoken that are
related to English, such as Krio and Liberian English. In a number of cases,
the language spoken by asylum seekers claiming to originate from Sierra Leone
or Liberia (both of which are/were regarded as unsafe countries by the
Immigration Department), has been determined by the ‘analyst’ as
being ‘not Krio’ or ‘not Liberian English’, usually supplemented
by the remark that what is spoken is probably Nigerian or Ghanaian Pidgin
English. Since Nigerians and Ghanaians are not entitled to asylum in the
Netherlands, these applications are subsequently denied. As a rule, the quality
of the ‘analyses’ is outright abominable, usually adducing only a
handful of language features allegedly supporting the linguistic identification
by the ‘analyst’. While the similarities between Krio and Nigerian
Pidgin English are well-known, the two languages are by no means identical.
Since many of the differences are of a very subtle nature, it is of utmost
importance that the analyses are performed by linguists who are specialized in
the languages concerned.
Marlyse Baptista (University
of Georgia) 2C, Thursday 2.00
The Cape Verdean NP in the
Sotavento varieties
The
study of the full noun phrase in the Sotavento (leeward) varieties of Cape
Verdean Creole (CVC) involves the semantics of indefinite and definite
determiners, the interpretive variability of null determiners, pluralization
strategies, and gender marking.
Most of the speech data in this paper is drawn from the corpus compiled in the course of three fieldtrips conducted in 1997, 2000 and 2001.
On the issue of interpretive variability of null determiners, the findings in this study will be shown to contrast significantly with earlier observations made by scholars such as Meintel (1975) and Lucchesi (1993).
There are two types of overt determiners in CVC (marking number but not gender as a rule): the indefinite article un (sg.) and its plural counterpart uns (plur.) which behaves more like a quantifier than a genuine determiner. Un is used to indicate that the referent is nonspecific, hence, is new in the discourse and in the shared consciousness of the speaker and hearer. Un may also refer to a specific entity, one already known by the speaker or both the speaker and hearer. Hence, it is important to emphasize that an NP introduced by un may be [indefinite, nonspecific/nonreferential], or [indefinite, specific/referential]. This state of affairs contradicts previous generalizations by Lucchesi (1993: 92-93) regarding the semantics of un/uns in CVC. Indeed, Lucchesi’s study supports Givón (1981: 52) who claims that in creoles, the indefinite article is only a marker for referential-indefinite nouns. Givón states that creoles “represent the first, earliest stage in that development of ‘one’ as an indefinite marker, where it is used only (my emphasis) to mark referential-indefinite nouns” (Givón, 1981: 36, Lucchesi, 1993: 86). Both Lucchesi and Givón granted to un/uns the exclusive function of marking an NP as referential (specific) indefinite. These claims are contradicted by corpus data in which nonreferential NPs are preceded by un.
In the realm of definiteness, kel (sg.)/kes (plur.) occasionally assumes the role of a definite determiner in the language, although its primary function is that of a demonstrative. Almada (1961) denies the existence of a definite article in CVC but acknowledges the possible use of the demonstrative kel/kes as a definite. Our seemingly diverging views are in fact reconcilable, as it will be shown that kel/kes actually has a double function in the language, primarily acting as a demonstrative but occasionally assuming the role of a definite article. On this issue, CVC determiners have followed an evolutionary path common to determiners in a number of world languages. Indeed, as stated in Janson (1984: 305), the numeral one has been adopted as the indefinite article.
The last sections of this paper will be dedicated to plur alization strategies and gender marking showing that the animacy hierarchy is the chief factor predicting whether or not a head noun will be marked with a plural or gender inflection.
John Baugh (Stanford
University) 2A, Thursday 3.00
Pidgin and creole educational policies in the wake
of the Ebonics controversy
This
paper evaluates a combination of federal and state laws and corresponding
educational policies for students who are speakers of pidgin and Creole
languages throughout the United States, including Hawaii. Linguists such as
Lippi-Green (1997) and Sato (1989) have raised important educational
considerations regarding students who are not native speakers of mainstream
varieties of English, and their work informs the present evaluation of recent
and on-going changes in federal and state laws that seek to modify or mandate
programs for students who are not readily classified as English language
learners (see Cummins 1980, Hakuta 1986, Valdés, 2000).
The educational controversy that began in Oakland, California in 1996 with a resolution declaring Ebonics to be the native language of African American students within that school district exposed additional legal gaps in educational language policies. Studies by Perry and Delpit (1997), Rickford and Rickford (2000), Adger et. al (2000) Baugh (2000) and Smitherman (2000) call specific attention to the educational plight of African American students. In so doing their efforts raise important educational questions that are directly or indirectly relevant to students who speak pidgin and Creole languages, especially for those varieties that were formulated in contact with English. Former secretary of Education, Richard Riley, concluded that Oakland’s educators were seeking bilingual education funding, and he denied access to such funding. The legality of his assertions is called into question here.
After a brief survey of legal issues regarding Title I (for students in poverty), Title VII (for English Language Learners) and the Individuals with Disabilities Educational Act (IDEA, for deaf students or others with pathological linguistic handicaps), we survey LeMoine’s innovative efforts in the Los Angeles Unified School District, beginning with the “Language Development Program for African American students,” and its evolution into the “Academic English Mastery Program.” Briefly, the latter effort, which is intended to serve students from diverse linguistic backgrounds, grows directly from bilingual education policies developed by Krashen (1984) and Cummins (1980), albeit with modifications that are intended to meet the literacy needs of traditional English language learners as well as students who are native speakers of African American vernacular English (i.e., AAVE, or Ebonics).
LeMoine’s efforts, supported by a combination of federal, state, and local funds, provide a basis upon which to consider expansion to other communities that serve pidgin and Creole students (e.g., such as students who speak Haitian Creole). However promising, we conclude with caution based of the efforts of Ron Unz, who has sponsored voter initiatives under the banner of “English for the Children.” His efforts have severely constrained bilingual education, and could easily restrict programs like those developed by LeMoine in Los Angeles.
The paper concludes with precise suggestions that can circumvent Unz’s efforts, and are tailored to comply with federal laws in pursuit of developing comprehensive educational language policies that are based upon the home language(s) of individual students; that is, regardless of their linguistic heritage.
Arthur J. Bell (Cornell
University) 5B, Saturday 11.00
Bipartite negation,
creoles, and UG
Bickerton (1981:51) includes negation as one of the “key areas of grammar” that “any creole theory must somehow account for.” However, in more recent work, even those scholars who argue creoles to be structurally distinct from languages “genetically related” to a single ancestor (cf. McWhorter 1998) do not include negation among the “cluster of traits” defining creole syntax. Nonetheless, some creoles share an interesting negation strategy. Consider the following examples from Afrikaans and Palenquero:
(1) Sy sluit nie die deur nie. Afrikaans
she
locks NEG the door NEG
‘She
doesn’t lock the door.’ (Oosthuizen
1998)
(2) No aguanté el calor de allá no. Palenquero
NEG stand the
heat of here NEG
‘I
can’t stand the heat here.’
(Schwegler 1991)
Intriguingly,
certain contact dialects of Spanish and Portuguese use a similar strategy:
(3) Yo
no sé nada que se llama así no. Dominican
Spanish
I NEG know nothing that REFL call this NEG
‘I
don’t know anything with that name.’ (Lipski 2001; my gloss)
(4) Não falo
italiano não. Vernacular
Brazilian Portuguese
NEG speak-1SG Italian NEG
‘I
don’t speak Italian.’
(Schwegler 1985-7)
The
negation strategy seen in (1-4) is also found in some African languages,
including Fon (DeGraff 1993), Hausa (Newman 2000), KiKongo (Lipski 2001), Nweh
(Nkemnji 1995), and Lubukusu (Wasike 2002).
In this paper I discuss the syntactic properties of the negation strategy in (1-4), and I provide a synchronic syntactic analysis. I then turn to a discussion of the development of bipartite negation in the above languages. I explore several possibilities, including: (a) substrate transfer (DenBesten 1988, Lipski 2001); (b) internal development (via an ‘accelerated Jespersen cycle’); (c) grammaticisation of a negative tag (Roberge 2000); and (d) satisfying a semantic/pragmatic requirement (Valkhoff 1966). Given these various possible triggers for syntactic change, it may be the case that each language in (1-4) developed bipartite negation via somewhat different means, yielding a many-to-one mapping from diachronic change to synchronic syntax.
Derek Bickerton (Professor
Emeritus, University of Hawai‘i) Plenary, Sunday 9.00
Refuting
the bioprogram is easy...
Many
attempts have been made to refute the bioprogram hypothesis. For instance, claims that creoles
developed gradually over several generations (Carden and Stewart 1989, Arends
1988) were shown to be groundless based on the authors' own data (Bickerton
1991). Claims by Lefebvre and
Lumsden (1989 ) and others that there were insufficient children in creole
colonies to start a creole were shown to be false in Bickerton (1990a) on the
basis of contemporary census records.
Claims that the serial verb constructions in Seselwa described in
Bickerton (1988) were not real serials, made by Seuren (1990) and Corne et al.
(1996), were in turn refuted in Bickerton (1990b, 1996). What would count as a refutation? If it
could be shown, for instance, that there was no pidgin stage in creole
development, as claimed recently by Mufwene (2001). That in at least some cases, early settlers produced contact
languages structurally close to their main lexifiers is not disputed: the issue
is whether such languages could survive the phase of rapid population expansion
that capitalist economies made almost inevitable. Evidence from Hawaii (Roberts
1995, 1998, 1999), from the structural characteristics of creoles (McWhorter
2001) and from statistical modeling of interaction under different demographic
conditions all converge to indicate that pidginization was almost unavoidable
in the expansion phase.
Cati Brown & Joe McFall
(Univeristy of Georgia) 4B, Friday 11.30
Computer modeling in
pidgin and creole genesis research
In
this paper, we examine computer modeling of complex systems and its application
to research in the field of creole genesis. This paper identifies and isolates
current unanswered questions that may be addressed with computational methods.
Our hope is that this paper is a first step in opening communication between
computational linguistics and pidgin and creole research.
We begin by reviewing relevant simulations currently being studied. Beginning with an overview of relevant computer simulations, we cohesively review modeling of language change, language evolution and complex systems as it pertains to pidgin and creole genesis. We focus on productive application of these simulations.
We then move to the identification of specific computer programs, resources and approaches that could aid endeavors to model creole genesis. We scrutinize the application of tools used in modeling complex systems such as genetic algorithms, and we review functioning programs such as Swarm.
Finally, we address considerations for future applications of computer modeling in pidgin and creole studies. Building on a wealth of current research, we identify parameters that would be relevant for modeled languages, e.g. prestige, dominance, number of contributing languages, etc. To conclude, we predict the manner in which these parameters could be computationally represented.
Chris Collins (Cornell
University) 5B, Saturday 10.30
A fresh look at habitual Be in AAVE
In
this talk, I will describe the use of an uninflected copular verb
“be” in colloquial (non-AAVE) English that has many of the same
syntactic properties as habitual be in AAVE. The relevant data are given below:
(1) a. If
you are not careful, you will be caught
b.
If you don’t be
careful, you will be caught
(2) a. If
you are not seen, you will escape
b.
*If you don’t be
seen, you will escape
In my (non-AAVE) idiolect, and the idiolects of many other people whom I have consulted (who do not control AAVE), there is a clear difference in acceptability between (1b) and (2b). The fact that (2b) is worse than (1b) seems to be related to the fact that one can be deliberately careful, but it is less likely that one is deliberately seen (especially in the context of an escape). Henceforth, I will call the form in (1b) agentive be.
The acceptability of (1b) is surprising in light of the fact that be, either as an auxiliary or a copular verb, does not usually permit do-support in colloquial (non-AAVE) English (*”I don’t be going”). The reason for the lack of do-support is that be normally raises to Infl, if Infl is not occupied by a modal auxiliary. Some other examples of agentive be are the following:
(3) a. If
you be nice to people, they’ll be nice back
b.
We be nice when
we’re trying to impress the teacher
c.
Salamanders will ignore
you if you be quiet and just watch
In this paper, I will give many naturally occurring examples (most of them will be from the internet) of agentive be. I will outline the main syntactic properties of agentive be, and show that it has many of the same syntactic characteristics as habitual be in AAVE (see Green 1998). In particular, in both cases, be fails to raise to finite Infl. Lastly, I will give a partially unified syntactic analysis of agentive be and habitual be. I claim that in colloquial (non-AAVE) English, be raises to an agentive light verb v (see Chomsky 1995, Collins 1997), blocking any further movement to Infl. In AAVE, be raises to a habitual Asp head, blocking any further movement.
Reference:
Green, Lisa. 1998. Aspect and Predicate
Phrases in African-American Vernacular English. In Mufwene et. al. (ed.),
African American English. Routledge, London.
Chris Corcoran (University
of Chicago)
4C, Friday
11.00
The
role of linguistic expertise in asylum applications:
A
case study of a Sierra Leonean asylum seeker in the Netherlands
Because of
war in Sierra Leone during the 1990s, a number of European countries granted
asylum status to Sierra Leonean refugees. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany
in particular are places where linguistic expertise has been solicited in
efforts to authenticate citizenship for refugees applying for asylum status without
documentation. In a number of countries in Europe there has been a radical
increase in the number of refugees seeking asylum in general and from African
countries in particular. For example, in Belgium the number of asylum seekers
was approximately 200 in 1981 but was as high as 24,000 per year in the 1990s
(Blommaert 2003). The dramatic increase in case loads has meant a constantly
evolving set of policies and relationship between government agencies and
forensic linguistic work. Thus far only a handful of published articles has
appeared on the topic: Blommaert 2001, 2003; Bobda et al 1999, Maryns 2000,
Maryns and Blommaert 2002.
This paper examines one case in detail involving a Sierra Leonean claimant in the Netherlands who was denied asylum based on a series of four language reports resulting from two taped interviews conducted specifically for the purposes of language analysis. These reports were generated over a period of two years by Sierra Leoneans with a minimal amount of linguistic training working for the Dutch Immigration Department. I present a review of the arguments I made concluding in favor of the asylum seeker. I compare lists of tokens presented by the Dutch Immigration Department as evidence against the Sierra Leonean origins of the claimant and my own lists. I discuss my presentation of counter arguments and also my struggle to articulate the role variation in pronunciation plays and notions of accommodation within the contra-expertise genre being developed in the asylum-seeking-in-the-Netherlands context. I discuss the particular problems generated for this asylum seeker because of conflicting interests between the institutional framing adopted by the language analysts on the one hand-one that looks for encyclopedic lists of information in its quest to authenticate-and the conventions of cooperative conversation on the other.
Michel DeGraff (MIT) 7B, Saturday 4.00
“Creolization”
is acquisition
The
goal of this essay is to establish some basic
“Cartesian-Uniformitarian” guidelines for constructive connections
between Creole studies and language-acquisition research---and linguistic
theory at large. Here "Cartesian" has a mentalist sense as in (e.g.)
Chomsky 1966, 1986, etc. I consider Creole genesis as the creation, in certain
socio-historical contexts, of certain I-languages. "Uniformitarian"
describes my fundamental Neogrammarian working assumption that no uniquely
"Creole" psycho-linguistic process can be postulated in order to
explain the creation of Creole idiolects: the latter are created by the same
psycho-linguistic mechanisms that are responsible for the creation of
(I-)languages everywhere else.
(Note: Throughout this paper, my own use of the term “creolization” is strictly as an a-theoretical abbreviation for the longer phrase “development of these languages that, for socio-historical reasons, have been labelled Creole”. In the perspective sketched here, creolization is just another instance of “language evolution”---in (e.g.) Mufwene's (2001) sense---the investigation of which is to shed light on Universal Grammar.)
In establishing Cartesian-Uniformitarian guidelines for Creole-genesis scenarios, I investigate the possible contributions of first-language acquisition (L1A) and second-language acquisition (L2A) to “creolization”. Creole-genesis theories that assign an exclusive role to either L1A (e.g., the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis) or L2A (e.g., the Relexification Hypothesis) are found to be inadequate conceptually, empirically and socio-historically. Focusing on Haitian Creole (HC) morphosyntactic data, I will constructively identify the empirical and theoretical limitations of both Bickerton's and Lefebvre's hypotheses and of the schools of thought they represent. In a nutshell, these scenarios are undermined by one seemingly-paradoxical basic property of HC---a socio-historically “prototypical Creole” if there ever was one---and other Caribbean Creoles. In the case of HC, this basic property can be summarized as follows: HC's lexicon, morphology and word-order are substantially, although far from exclusively, derived from the socio-historically relevant French varieties.
What seems compatible with the available linguistic and socio-historical details and with current results in linguistic-theoretical research, including language-acquisition research, is a scenario in which both adult learners and child learners in (e.g.) the colonial Caribbean contributed to the "creation" of Creole languages, each group in their own principled way.
In the Cartesian-Uniformitarian model to be sketched in this paper, the development of I-languages, be they called “Creole” or not, always involves the (re-)creation of idiolects (i.e., complex mental grammars with recursive combinatorial power) from relatively ``impoverished'' input. In all instances of acquisition, the learner's input is exposed to a necessarily finite set of utterances as produced by the heterogeneous set of lects in the language learner's environment. It must be stressed that language learners---both children and adults---invariably find themselves in various kinds of language-/dialect-/idiolect-contact situations. Any socio-historical and demographic differences among various cases of contact-induced language change/creation will have an effect, not on acquisition processes per se (these are generally the same everywhere), but on the PLD (e.g., on the proportion and the fluency of non-native utterances therein) that native learners will use in creating their new I-languages.
NB: This discussion will also help us clarify and redefine the terms of various protracted debates in Creole genesis, including the debates about the roles of adults vs. children, about gradual vs. abrupt creolization and about mentalist vs. sociohistorical methodologies.
Dagmar Deuber (University
of Freiburg) 1A, Thursday 10.30
Aspects of variation in
educated Nigerian Pidgin: Verbal structures
In the wake of publications by
DeCamp and Bickerton in the early 1970s, the prevailing view on creole-lexifier
contact situations used to be that such situations eventually give rise to a
continuous spectrum of variation from the creole (basilect) to the lexifier
(acrolect), the "(post-)creole continuum" (also extended to
"(post-)pidgin continuum"). On the basis of this theory, it has been
suggested that continua of the type found by DeCamp and Bickerton in Jamaica
and Guyana, respectively, also exist, or are bound to arise, in similar
situations elsewhere, e.g. in West Africa and Melanesia, where English-based
extended pidgins coexist with English (Todd 1974, Bickerton 1975 ["Can
English and Pidgin be kept apart?"]). However, for Melanesia, this view
has recently been challenged: Siegel (1997) and Smith (2000) argue that one can
find language contact phenomena like borrowing and code-switching, but no Caribbean-type
continuum. This, as Siegel (1997:201) also points out, may be taken as
corroborating evidence for a different theory of the origin of the Caribbean
continua: that they are not recent developments out of an earlier dichotomous
situation but owe their existence to the socio-historical circumstances of
Caribbean societies during the period of slavery (Alleyne 1971, 1980; Mufwene
1996; also Bickerton himself since about 1983).
The present
paper examines this issue in relation to the major variety of West African
Pidgin, Nigerian Pidgin (NigP). Quantitative methodology is applied to a corpus
of NigP as spoken by educated, urban Nigerians collected by the author during
fieldwork in Nigeria. Three aspects of verbal structures in educated NigP are
analysed: tense/aspect, copulas and related constructions, and verbal negation.
All of these are areas for which various empirical studies conducted in the
anglophone Caribbean (e.g. Bickerton 1973, 1975 [Dynamics of a Creole System]; Patrick 1999) have documented the
existence of a mesolectal zone in between the basilect and the acrolect, which
is characterized not only by extensive variation between basilectal and
acrolectal variants, but also by uniquely or typically mesolectal forms, e.g. did
+ V for past tense
(basilect: bin +
V; acrolect: Ved),
zero copula (basilect: a/de; acrolect: inflected be), and verbal negation by forms like invariant duon/doon + V (basilect: no/na + V; acrolect: don't/doesn't/didn't
+ V). However,
although educated, urban speakers typically use mesolectal rather than
basilectal varieties, no such intermediate morphosyntactic forms are attested
in the present corpus. Furthermore, the variants that would be described as
“acrolectal” in a continuum situation are very infrequent in the
corpus in comparison to the “basilectal” ones and tend to occur
mainly in fixed expressions and larger segments of discourse in English that
can be interpreted as code-switches. The data for these selected areas of the
grammar therefore do not indicate the existence of a mesolect and, by
implication, of a continuum comparable to the Caribbean ones in Nigeria. This
may be interpreted as further evidence that such continua are special phenomena
calling for an explanation which takes into account specific local circumstances,
and are not bound to arise in all pidgin/creole-lexifier contact situations.
Ana Deumert (Monash
University) 6A, Saturday 2.00
Praatjies and Boerenbrieven -
Popular literature as an instrument of normalization and
standardization in the history
of Afrikaans
Popular literary culture played an important role in the early
standardization of Afrikaans, a complex colonial contact language with
pidgin/creole ancestry (cf. Roberge forth.). From the 1820s short literary
texts in what was meant to represent the general Cape colloquial began to
appear in the periodical press of the colony. This popular tradition developed
from the 1850s into a highly productive genre and influenced the formation of
an early Afrikaans standard language by shaping expectations about social,
linguistic and national authenticity, leading to the identification of certain
linguistic practices as a marker of Afrikaner identity (at the time, Afrikaner
identity politics was not necessarily limited to the European section of the
population, see e.g. the literary practices which are attested for the Moravian
mission stations, cf. Belcher 1987). The early Afrikaans literary tradition is
best described as a type of variety imitation (cf. Preston 1992): the texts
were largely produced by outsiders (most commonly recent immigrants to the
colony), and showed linguistic and graphemic manipulations of the basilectal,
mesolectal and acrolectal varieties which coexisted within the Cape Dutch
language continuum.
This paper
provides an analysis of the symbolic and indexical functions of the early
Afrikaans literary tradition, and shows how the linguistic (specifically
morphological and syntactic) structures characteristic of these popular
writings came to be used as social and ideological resources in non-literary
texts. The data basis for the analysis includes early literary texts, the Corpus
of Cape Dutch Correspondence (1880-1922, cf. Deumert 2001) as
well as a small, pragmatically cohesive corpus of application letters (1924;
the Nanny letters).
References:
Belcher, R. 1987.
Afrikaans en kommunikasie oor die kleurgrens. In: Afrikaans en Taalpolitiek. Ed. by H. Du Plessis and
T. Du Plessis, 17-35. Pretoria: HAUM.
Deumert, A. 2001. Language variation and standardization at the Cape
(18801922): A contribution to Afrikaans sociohistorical linguistics. Journal
of Germanic Linguistics 13: 30152.
Preston, D.R. 1992. Talking Black and Talking White: A Study in
Variety Imitation. Old Engish and New. Studies in the Honor of Fredric G.
Cassidy. Ed. by J.H. Hall, N. Doane and D. Ringler, 237-355. New York: Garland
Publishing.
Roberge, P. T. Forthcoming. Reconstructing the Cape Dutch Pidgin. In Pidgins:
Their Nature and Significance, P. Baker, H. den Besten and M. Parkvall (eds).
London: Battlebridge.
Janet L. Donnelly (The
College of The Bahamas) 2A, Thursday 2.00
Bahamian Creole English:
Orthographic representations
While
no standardized orthography exists for Bahamian Creole English (BCE) – or
as it is popularly known, Bahamian Dialect – through the years various
writers (e.g., authors, poets, folklorists, lyricists, cartoonists, and
satirists) have consciously devised eye dialect representations for those BCE
pronunciations which diverge from the regional standard (e.g., “Dis we t’ing”
for “These are our things.” or teewee for ‘TV’). Furthermore, Bahamian students
attempting to write in the standard sometimes unintentionally reveal
basilectal, as well as mesolectal, pronunciations through their spelling errors
(e.g., “The mean idea of
this essay is…”) and hypercorrections (“He was at a lost for words.”).
In this paper I review both published and private writings that reflect BCE phonological differences through ‘eye dialect’ or surface errors. I use present day and past writing samples which reflect systematic differences between Standard Bahamian and Bahamian Creole English consonants, vowels and phonotactics – as well as individual word variation, hypercorrections and some regional differences within the Bahamas.
Ultimately, research into both the intentional use of eye dialect and unintentional spelling errors generated by BCE speakers can be useful not only in shedding light on the phonology of BCE (both past and present) but in providing more productive approaches to the teaching of literacy and the language arts. Students can gain a greater appreciation for the rich literary traditions which underpin their culture and achieve a better grasp of the phonological differences which might otherwise present daunting obstacles to attaining literacy in the standard.
Such research can also inform the creation of a standardized
orthography for BCE, thus providing a means of reflecting and preserving it as
a language – without relying on eye dialect for reflecting these
differences, an approach which presents its own set of problems, as noted by
Roberts (1988), who indicates that it “…brings with it emotional
values which more often than not cloud any phonetic precision that the
orthographic symbols…are intended to give” (West Indians and
Their Language, 137)
Emanuel J. Drechsel (University of Hawai‘i at Ma@noa) 1B, Thursday 11.30
Towards an ethnohistory of
pidgins: Colonial documents as hostile witnesses
The
rapid decline of endangered languages, including pidgins, requires linguists to
draw increasingly on historical attestations as a prime source for their study,
which in turn calls for a carefully defined historical approach. The answer
lies in an explicitly historical sociolinguistics to cover not only recent
periods (the focus of most sociolinguistic research), but a greater range of
time (such as several centuries) along with a consideration of a wider
sociocultural context of language use. With additional time depth, one should
expect a greater array of data in terms of quality, as they indeed occur in
earlier historical attestations. However, instead of simply dismissing early
observations and recordings of the colonial period on grounds that they do not
meet modern linguistic standards and that most of their authors were not
sympathetic to speakers of non-European languages, we can consider them as
equivalent to depositions by hostile witnesses, subject to cross-examination or
reinterpretation for what they are truly worth.
The framework for such a broadly defined historical-sociolinguistic reinterpretation is an ethnohistory of speaking, i.e. the restoration of historical linguistic attestations by triangulation with comparative modern evidence following philological principles and the critical interpretation of extralinguistic sociohistorical factors by ethnological criteria. Selected examples for illustration of this approach come from two geographically separate, linguistically unrelated cases: Muskogean-based Mobilian Jargon of the lower Mississippi River valley and Maritime Polynesian Pidgin of the Pacific. Not only do early attestations of these two non-European pidgins, once reconstituted, surprise in their overall accuracy as determined on grounds of their structural consistency with independent data, including modern field recordings for Mobilian Jargon; but historical records for both pidgins also yield sufficient information to address extralinguistic issues of use and functions, and prove equivalent to other sociohistorical data, thus making possible historical research of extralinguistic aspects. At the same time, the overall quality of historical attestations for these non-European pidgins raises some serious doubts about the range and quality of accompanying attestations of Pidgin English, many of which appear in the record for no obvious linguistic or sociohistorical reason (such as references to Pacific Islanders confirmed not to know a word of English, then recorded to speak Pidgin English with considerable fluency). Such documentation of Pidgin English looks rather suspect as historical attestation, and likely proves little more than a transliteration of native speech (including Anglophone-Anglophile hypercorrections) in which the author met his audience’s expectations for an intelligible if distinct dialogue. Modifications of non-European pidgins towards the indigenous target languages upon which they drew, however, was not an issue for European or American historians, simply because in most cases they did not have access to these target languages nor did they usually intend to write for an audience in these target languages. What data for non-European pidgins may lack in numbers, they make up in quality, rendering an ethnohistory of speaking quite promising indeed.
Stephanie Durrleman
(University of Geneva) 6C, Saturday 2.30
The articulation of
inflection in Jamaican Creole
This research is concerned
with the syntax of inflectional markers in Jamaican Creole (JC). Although these
markers have been previously described (e.g. Bailey (1966), Patrick(1999)),
their relative hierarchy deserves closer analysis. Literature on Creoles has
generally claimed that the ordering of functional particles is Tense - Mood/modal – Aspect, hence they
are referred to as TMA markers. In the present work, I propose a more
fine-grained articulation of inflection in JC.
I begin by
observing that modals can co-occur in this language, so their relative order
needs to be determined:
(1) Im wooda muss kyan ‘elp uno
I consider various data
revealing that when the combination of modals takes place, this combination
must respect a certain ordering constraint.
Then I discuss
the distribution of modals in relation to tense, drawing on data from JC to
exemplify that both Tense > Modal (2), and Modal > Tense (3) are attested
orders:
(2) Im did mos hafi
du i’
3rd
sg Past Modal Modal do it
‘s/he
had to do it’
‘S/he
would have said that’
I show that these
distributional differences are linked to an epistemic/root interpretational
distinction.
Finally, I
examine the distribution of aspectual particles, which like modals, can co-occur
in a specific order. In working out the structure for these markers, I also
attempt to account for the distribution of completive done, which has the particularity of
occasionally occurring in a post-VP configuration. When done precedes [-stative] verbs, it can
yield two different interpretations (4), unlike when it follows them (5):
(4) Im done nyam i’
a) ‘S/he
already ate it’
b) ‘S/he
finished eating it’
(5) Im nyam i’ done
3rd sg
eat it done
a)
‘*S/he already ate it’
b) ‘She
finished eating it’
I take this to suggest the
presence of two different done markers in JC, one corresponding to the meaning
[+Completive] as given by the verb ‘to finish’ in English, and the
other corresponding to the meaning [+Anterior], as given by the adverb
‘already’ in English. I propose an analysis for the instances of
post-VP done in terms of VP-movement to [Spec,CompletiveP]. A wide range of data
suggests that VP-movement is limited in JC, explaining why the VP cannot target
[Spec,AnteriorP] (see 5a), as movement as high as AnteriorP would violate
Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990).
The following
overall ordering for preverbal markers in JC is shown to be as follows:
(6) Mod epistemic > T > Mod necessity
> Mod root obligation > Mod root ability/permission > T [+anterior]
> Asp [+retrospective] > Asp [+progressive] > Asp [+prospective] >
Asp [+completive]
This structure proves compatible with the framework adopted in Cinque
(1999), and therefore provides new evidence in favour of a universal clausal
architecture.
Sabine Ehrhart (Lacito du
CNRS / Universität des Saarlandes) 6B, Saturday 2.30
Pidginization and creolization in the general context of language
acquisition – what creolists and acquisitionists can learn from each
other
The study will be based on two corpora collected by the author herself:
from Tayo, a French-based creole spoken in New Caledonia (1988-1993; 1998;
2003), and from the a project on early language teaching in primary schools in
the German region of Saarland (2000-2003)
In both cases,
the data are analyzed transcriptions of speech productions. For the Pacific
corpus, there will also be retrospective interviews (triangulation) with
first-generation-speakers of the creole on attitudes and interaction schemes
during the development of Tayo.
By studying the
learner production in the second project, we found clear parallels with the
creolization processes examined earlier (Ehrhart 1993, 2003). On the other
hand, there are important differences in the classroom setting concerning the
learner output depending on the kind of interaction. In this field,
code-switching is an important clue for comprehension of attitude and language
contact processes (see below).
I will to
propose a typology of language learning based on the kind of interaction
existing between the representatives of the different speech communities. There
seems to be a continuum between the different situations (natural –
institutional) more than a dichotomy.
The findings
can be important for educational issues (curricula, settings of language
learning).