IN
THIS ISSUE (No.6) |
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As
mentioned in the last issue, Jeff Allen has completed two graduate
theses on St. Lucian and Dominican creoles. Here are summaries by
the author: “Sainte-Lucie:
Description sociolinguistique d’une île antillaise”.
(Maîtrise Thesis. Département des Sciences du Langage,
Université Lyon, 1992). “This
thesis is a sociolinguistic study of St Lucian French Creole, a
language spoken on the island of St Lucia in the West Indies. Chapter
one, taking a historical perspective, treats issues such as language
varieties, pidginization, and creolization. Also included is a brief
case study comparison of St Lucia and Martinique. Chapter two takes
on a more contemporary point of view with various discussions on
economy (internal resources, external aid, tourism), cultural points
(theater, radio, medicine, church/religion, Internation-al Creole
Day), language varieties in modern St Lucia, the process of relexification,
psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors, language attitudes
and an overview of Former Lexifier Language Acquisition (FLLA).
Allen has coined the term FLLA for the specific context of St Lucia
where French, once the official language of the island and the lexifier
language of St Lucian Creole, was replaced by a competing international
language (English) in the 19th century. When the contemporary St
Lucian seeks to learn French, certain factors facilitate or impede
the learning process. FLLA may also apply to other Creole contexts
that show evidence of a change in the official status of the lexifier
language in the past. Chapter three looks to the future with discussion
on the political climate, standardization of the orthography, literacy
programs for children and adults, and post-literacy issues.” “Sainte-Lucie:
relexification, décreolisation, recreolisation ou adlexification?”
(Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies Thesis, Département
des Sciences du Langage & Centre de Recherches Linguistiques
et Sémiologiques, Université Lyon, 1993) “This
thesis is a phonological study of loanwords that originate from
different varieties of standard and local English and that have
now entered into the St Lucian and Dominican French Creoles. This
study reconsiders the concept of word-borrowing by first defining
the situation of St Lucia and Dominica within various contemporary
theories of lexification and then by analyzing data according to
pertinent issues in socio-linguistics and psycholinguistics. Textual
data is collected from newspapers and folkloric stories written
in the two French Creole varieties; interviews are conducted with
St Lucians living in the UK based on the data collected in the texts. “Chapter
one presents the socio-historical development of St Lucian Creole
from the arrival of the Europeans in the 17th century up through
case studies of modern century tutoring and literacy programs. Chapter
two contains complete phonetic and phonemic inventories for the
varieties of English and the French Creole that coexist both in
St Lucia and in Dominica. Chapter three provides a 30-page comprehensive
diachronic survey of the theories of creolization, decreolization,
re-creolization, relexification, and adlexification. Chapter four
examines the degree of lexical influence that occurs through the
contact of two languages, including topics such as language choice,
code-switching, word-borrowing, and bilingualism. Chapter five contains
analyses of over 200 utterances/ sentences with loanwords from English
varieties that are found in the writing and speech of St Lucian
and Dominican French Creole speakers. Chapter six discusses the
data by categorizing the examples of the corpus into semantic domains.
Chapter seven, contrary to past literature on St Lucian French Creole,
concludes by stating that these French Creoles today are not undergoing
relexification, a process normally attributed to the pidginization
stage of language develop-ment. This study rather argues that adlexifi-cation
(lexical borrowing from coexisting adstrate languages) is currently
affecting these French Creoles via English varieties, thus producing
some totally assimilated loan-words, some non-assimilated loanwords,
and some partially assimilated loanblends in St Lucian and Dominican
French Creoles.” Jeff’s
latest address is:
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