This study refutes the common idea that tone gets simplified or eliminated in creoles and contact languages. Speakers of African tone languages imposed tone systems on all Afro-European creoles ...spoken in the tone-dominant linguistic ecologies of Africa and the colonial Americas. African speakers of tone languages also imposed tone systems on the colonial varieties of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese spoken in tonal Africa. A crucial mechanism involved in the emergence of the tone systems of creoles and colonial varieties is stress-to-tone mapping. A typological comparison with African non-creole languages shows that creole tone systems are no simpler than African non-creole tone systems. Demographic, linguistic, and social changes in an ecology can lead to switches from tone to stress systems and vice versa. As a result, there is an areal continuum of tone systems roughly coterminous with the presence of tone in the east (Africa) and stress in the west (Americas). Transitional systems combining features of tone and stress converge on the areal buffer zone of the Caribbean. The prosodic systems of creoles and European colonial varieties undergo regular processes of contact, typological change and areal convergence. None of these are specific to creoles. So far, creoles and colonial varieties have not featured in work on the world-wide areal clustering of prosodic systems. This study therefore aims to contribute to a broader perspective on prosodic contact beyond the narrow confines of the creole simplicity debate.
Aims and objectives:
Social factors in language contact are not well understood. This study seeks to establish and explain the role of social entrenchment in the evolution of contact languages. It ...also aims to contribute to a broader perspective on areality that can account for social and linguistic factors in contact outcomes involving all languages present in multilingual ecologies, including contact languages.
Methodology:
The copula system was singled out for a detailed analysis. A corpus of primary data of the three African English-lexifier contact languages, Pichi, Cameroon Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin, their ancestor Krio, and of their African adstrates (Bube, Mokpe, Akan) and European superstrates (Spanish, English) was investigated and compared.
Data and analysis:
Relevant features were selected for a dissimilarity matrix. A quantitative analysis was done with SplitsTree4. The resulting distance matrix and phylogenetic network were investigated for signals of genealogical transmission and areal diffusion and interpreted on their social background.
Findings/conclusions:
The copula systems of the three contact languages carry a genealogical signal of their ancestor Krio as well as an areal signal from the adstrates and superstrates spoken in their respective ecologies. The amount of areal borrowing increases in the order Pichi < Cameroon Pidgin < Ghanaian Pidgin, reflective of the depth of social entrenchment of each variety from left to right.
Originality:
Previous studies do not describe the copula systems of the English-lexifier contact languages of Africa and the Caribbean at a similar level of granularity and mostly focus on their emergence during creolization. This study attempts to explain their subsequent areal differentiation and links it to differences in social ecologies.
Significance/implications:
Areal borrowing can lead to significant departures from genealogically inherited structures within a short time if social entrenchment is shallow. Conversely, even languages of wider communication can remain remarkably stable if social entrenchment is deep.
Likpakpaln is a little-described Mabia (Gur) language of northern Ghana. Drawing on primary data, this first study of adjectives in Likpakpaln concludes that the language has a small, closed ...adjective class of about 20 members that shares grammatical properties with nouns and verbs to varying degrees. Contrary to what is the case in other Mabia languages, Likpakpaln adjectives lack inherent class markers. We identify three types of adjectives, distinguishable from nouns and verbs on morpho-syntactic and semantic grounds. Type 1 items lean towards nouns and never function as predicates of verbal clauses. Type 2 consists of one item, possibly a loan, and appears in a predicate adjective construction typical of languages with large adjective classes. Type 3 adjectives lean towards verbs and may form the predicate of verbal clauses. An understanding of Likpakpaln adjectives can contribute to refining our current knowledge of the genetic and typological position of Likpakpaln in the Mabia family.
Pichi is an Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. It is an offshoot of 19th century Krio (Sierra Leone) and shares many characteristics with West ...African relatives like Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English, as well as with the English-lexifier creoles of the insular and continental Caribbean. This comprehensive description presents a detailed analysis of the grammar and phonology of Pichi. It also includes a collection of texts and wordlists. Pichi features a nominative-accusative alignment, SVO word order, adjective-noun order, prenominal determiners, and prepositions. The language has a seven-vowel system and twenty-two consonant phonemes. Pichi has a two-tone system with tonal minimal pairs, morphological tone, and tonal processes. The morphological structure is largely isolating.
Boundaries and Bridges Yakpo, Kofi; Muysken, Pieter C
2017, 2017-06-26, Letnik:
14
eBook
This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects ...to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.
In the world Englishes literature, ‘indigenization’ is shorthand for the localization of Outer Circle Englishes in former exploitation colonies like Ghana. However, the localization of Ghanaian ...English has been continually reversed by ‘corrective’ realignment with world standard English through institutional regimes. By contrast, the localization of Ghanaian Pidgin English has proceeded unhampered by standardization. This article provides a first analysis of the copula system of Ghanaian Pidgin English, showing that it owes much to patterns found in Akan and other languages of southern Ghana. In this domain, Ghanaian Pidgin English has indigenized and differentiated itself from its sister languages. I propose a consistent and expansive definition of indigenization as ‘the areal alignment of a latecomer with a linguistic ecology, causing its divergence from related varieties elsewhere.’ This study of indigenization shifts the focus from standardized Englishes to contact Englishes. The latter remain unfettered by institutional intervention and are therefore better suited to illustrating the natural dynamics of indigenization than standardized Englishes.
Suriname represents an interesting case of unidirectional multilingual convergence in a linguistic area. The multilingual ecology of Suriname is hierarchical. The Germanic language Dutch exerts ...structural and lexical influence 'downwards', but other languages do not do so 'upwards' to the same degree. This study analyses the development of word order in the Indo-Aryan language Sarnami and the Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole Sranan, the two largest languages of Suriname besides Dutch. The results show that Sarnami and Sranan have undergone a typological realignment in word order. Sranan has completed a shift from postpositional locative nouns to prepositions through language contact and structural borrowing from Dutch. Sarnami is acquiring SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) as a basic word order next to SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) through structural borrowing from Dutch and Sranan. Conversely, standardisation pressures prevent innovative linguistic practices and structural borrowing from the other languages of Suriname from consolidating themselves in Surinamese Dutch in a similar way. The change that spoken Dutch has undergone in Suriname through influence from Sranan and Sarnami is therefore more modest than the changes Sranan and Sarnami have incurred through Surinamese Dutch influence. This study compares changes in these three languages for the first time and highlights the role of both social and typological factors in driving or impeding areal convergence in multilingual ecologies.
Reciprocal constructions Yakpo, Kofi
Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages,
8/2023
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
This study analyzes the borrowing of Dutch reciprocal pronouns in a corpus of primary field data of Sranan, Sarnami, and Surinamese Javanese, three languages of Suriname. The expression of ...reciprocity in relevant African and Asian substrates of the languages under study is also presented and discussed. I suggest cognitive and sociolinguistic explanations for the preference of Dutch-sourced reciprocal pronouns during multilingual contact. The three languages show convergent borrowing processes favoring the dedicated Dutch reciprocal pronoun over ‘scattered’ native strategies. Further, Suriname is a hierarchical post-colonial language ecology in which borrowing proceeds mostly in one direction, either directly from Dutch, or from Dutch via Sranan. The parallel multilingual trajectory of contact-induced change in the expression of a complex notion like reciprocity showcases the attractiveness for borrowing of forms and structures with transparent relations between form and content.
This volume brings together linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives on code-switching. Featuring new data from five continents and languages with a large range of linguistic ...affiliations, the contributions all address the role of social factors in determining the forms and outcomes of code-switching. This book is a significant addition to the empirical and theoretical foundations of the study of code-switching.
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