1. science
2. social science
3. linguistics

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Eighth Creolistics Workshop
Pidgins and creoles in a comparative perspective
University of Giessen, Germany
2 to 4 April 2009
Abstracts (2009-03-12 version)
Two possessive constructions in Mauritian
Mushina Alleesaib
ZAS Berlin, Germany/ Université Paris VIII, France
Mauritian Creole is not the only Creole language to have two possessive constructions :
‘Plain’ strategy :
(1)a.
[Baba Mala]
malad.
baby M.
sick
Resumptive construction :
b.
[Mala so
baba]DP
M.
POSS-3SG
baby
‘Mala’s baby is sick.’
malad.
sick
Holm (2000 : 218) mentions that Papiamentu and Guyanese CF also have two patterns.
The resumptive strategy is so-called because it contains a 3rd person pronominal form that
may be singular or plural. It has been argued that it shows the influence of Indo-Aryan
languages brought about by massive immigration of Bhojpuri-speakers from India since 1835
(Corne 1986, Baker and Corne 1986). Syea (1994) presents arguments against this language
contact hypothesis and argues for the role of language-internal developments. Syea (1994)
and Guillemin (2007), incidentally, find evidence of a mixed type that precedes the
resumptive strategy in the historical development of Mauritian.
This paper is intended to contribute some data to the view argued for by Syea and Guillemin :
that is, that language-internal factors are influential in the co-existence and distribution of the
two constructions. Its focus on synchronic data will show that each construction is used for
different purposes.
The plain strategy provides a pattern for a number of other noun-noun relations part-whole
relations or substance-object relations.
(3) chal laswa /*Laswa so chal ‘ silk shawl’
It is subject to certain syntactic restrictions, the most important of which is that nothing
(determiner or adjective) may intervene between the two nouns
(4) *Bala la Mala.
In the plain construction, none of the elements may be compared or contrasted to a third
element, nor can the possessor be a possible antecedent of a pronoun. These restrictions do
not hold in the resumptive construction. On the other, it cannot form part of a generic
sentence.
These facts point to the loss of referential and syntactic autonomy of the two elements in the
plain strategy while the resumptive strategy on the other hand is less constrained. If this
explanation is correct, it might offer clues to the current situation in other Creoles as well.
Creoles and The Lexicon-Syntax Interface
Muhsina Alleesaib, Tonjes Veenstra
ZAS Berlin, Germany
What is needed in addition to the syntactic component in order to form syntactically well-formed
sentences is a lexical component that captures the relevant features of the predicates the syntax
works on. The influence of the lexicon on the syntax reveals itself most clearly in the case of sentenceembedding predicates. Although it is clear that differences exist between predicates with respect to
selectional restrictions (believe that vs. *believe whether), and possible control readings (x promises y
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to come → x will come; x persuades y to come → y should come), it is less clear to what extent the
syntax of embedded sentences is determined by the lexical specifications of sentence-embedding
predicates, and to what extent the lexical properties of such predicates are influenced by syntactic
properties of subordination structures. We argue creoles are an ideal testing ground for these sort of
questions.
The other perspective is comparative. One of the leading questions here is whether there is a
clustering effect: (i) which properties of clause-embedding (classification of predicates, syntactic
status, etc.) are uniform across creole languages?; (ii) what variation do we find between creole
languages, and to what extent is this variation determined by the influence of superstrate and/or
substrate languages on the ensuing creole? This perspective is particular to language contact
research. If it turns out that the lexical properties of these predicates (and the reconstitution of
predicate classes) are dependent on the syntactic properties of subordination structures, this can be
interpreted as an argument in favor of semantic transparency framework of Seuren & Wekker (1986).
If, on the other hand, lexical properties of these predicates drive the syntax their embeddings, this
might be construed as an argument for a relexificational account of creole genesis, especially if it can
be be shown that the creole exactly follows the substrate languages in their subordination patterns.
We present an overview and analysis of sentence-embedding predicates and their associated syntax
of a selection of French- and English-related creoles, and evaluate the different scenario’s for creole
genesis on the basis of that.
A Principled Classification of English-Based Popular Vernaculars in the Caribbean
Mervyn C. Alleyne
University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras
The paper examines critically the uncertainty which still surrounds the use of the term “creole” in
scientific discourse, chiefly because it is still not well-defined even after decades of use. Creole
linguistics has had to use exotic, equally ill-dcefined terms and concepets such as “semi-creole” and
“creoloid” in an effort to squeeze some phenomena under the rubric “creole”. Thre has been
considerable interest in the question as to whether Bajan is a “creole (a vacuous question since we
really do not know what a “creole” is).
The paper takes a global view of English-based vernaculars of the Caribbean and proposes a
principled classification. It will especially deal with vernaculars such as Bajan and Trini to show how
they fit in historically and typologically to the larger picture.
New typological light on the similarities between creoles
Peter Bakker, Aymeric Daval-Markussen
Aarhus University, Denmark
With regard to the structure of creole languages, one can distinguish discussions relating to diachronic
and synchronic aspects. Diachronic aspects relate to the origin of creole structures: to what extent do
they derive from the lexifiers, from the substrate languages, from some universal language creation
device, or from some common historical origin? From a synchronic viewpoint, Muysken discussed
three areas in 1988 in which creoles were supposed to be different from non-creoles: creoles are said
to be more simple than non-creoles, more similar to each other, and more mixed.
In our paper we will use newly developed models from biology that can also be applied to linguistics.
These models have been used in linguistics, but not in yet for creole languages. Our paper will shed
light on issues of mixedness and common origins, and especially on the issue of the suggested
structural similarities between creoles. Techniques have been developed that analyse connections
between languages as networks and trees. These techniques can point to historical and contemporary
similarities, as well as horizontal influences (borrowings). For our paper, we have entered a range of
structural data from creoles. We have compared (a) a set of creoles with the same lexifier with each
other, (b) a set of creoles with different lexifiers with each other, and (c) creoles with a sample of noncreoles. The preliminary results suggest that lexifiers and substrates played only a very limited role in
the linguistic outcomes. Shared creole features suggest largely several independent geneses, which
means that the shared features between creoles are mostly of a typological nature, and hardly linkable
to substrates and superstrates.
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Nigerian Pigin English and Sierra Leonean Krio: Varieties of the Same Language?
Saidu Bangura
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
The linguistic success of Britain as an empire led not only to the exportation of British English and its
consequent varieties the world over but also to the birth of a good number of pidgins and creoles,
namely the Atlantic and Pacific groups of English-based pidgins and creoles (Holm 1988). Presentday West African Pidgin English in general and Nigerian Pidgin English in particular started in Sierra
Leone and spread to other countries in West Africa “from the Gambia in the northwest to Cameroon in
the southeast” with Sierra Leoneans shaping the development of West African English (op. cit: 406 ff).
Does their historical interconnectedness mean that present day Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) and
present day Sierra Leonean Krio (SLK) share similar structural features?
1a SLK
1b NPE
A
de
go na
os
1sg PROG go PREP (LOC) house
A
de
go fɔ
haus
1sg PROG go PREP (LOC) house
‘I am going home/to my house.’
And can they be mutually intelligible?
2a SLK
2b NPE
Go wit
am / Kɛr
am go
go with it / carry/take it
go
Carry
am follow bɔdi
carry
it
follow body
‘Go with it’ / ‘Take it along.’
Since West African languages such as Yoruba (and other “Kwa” languages) and also a number of
West Atlantic languages in its substrate/adstrate such as Temne have greatly influenced SLK, should
we expect NPE structural features to reflect similar influences?
To answer these questions, this paper compares a survey of some 100 morphosyntactic features in
SLK (Yillah and Corcoran 2007) with equivalent features in NPE (Njeuma 1995).
The author is a native speaker of Temne and SLK and an avid reader of Nigerian literature, particularly
the works of Achebe and Soyinka, (who use NPE for certain social and linguistic effects) and
understands NPE due to contact with Nigerians.
References
Finney, M A. Substratal Influence on the Morphosyntactic Properties of Krio in Linguistic Discovery 2.
Pages 58-83.
Holm, J. 1988. Pidgins and Creoles: Theory and Structure 1 [Cambridge Language Surveys].
Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Holm, J. 1988. Pidgins and Creoles: Reference Surveys 2 [Cambridge Language Surveys].
Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Holm, J and Peter L Patrick (eds.). 2007. Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel Outlines of 18 Creole
Grammars. London: Battlebridge.
Njeuma, Bernadette J. 1995. Structural Similarities between Sierra Leonean Krio and Two West
African Anglophone Pidgins: A Case for Common Origins. PhD Dissertation. Ann Arbor: UMI.
On the Evolution of Verbal and Nominal Morphology in Three Lusophone Creoles
Marlyse Baptista
University of Michigan, USA
This paper provides a plausible reconstruction of inflectional and free-standing morphemes in three
lusophone creoles, Cape Verdean Creole (CVC), Guinea-Bissau Creole (GBC) and São Tomense
(ST). The core objective of this study is two-fold: the first is to use diachronic materials primarily found
in Gil Vicente (1536), Teyssier (1959), Morais-Barbosa (1967), as well as accounts and observations
from Carreira (1983) and Boulègue (1983) to examine the development of verbal and nominal
morphology in all three creoles. We provide a complete survey of inflectional and free standing pre-
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verbal and post-verbal morphemes in the verbal domain as well as inflectional and free-standing
morphemes in the nominal domain. The core of our findings is that such morphemes developed quite
late in these languages and that when comparing the entire set of morphemes to one another,
preverbal mood and aspect markers seem to have emerged much earlier in all three languages, in
contrast to postverbal morphemes. While this diachronic account allows to trace back some
morphemes to Archaic Portuguese (Silva, 1991), some semantic properties may be traced back to
substrates such as Wolof (Lang, 1999) or are innovative and distinct from the known source
languages. Although much of this paper is dedicated to the morpho-syntactic, semantic properties
and evolution of morphology in these lusophone creoles, a second objective is to address the sociohistorical settings of their formation, as they shed light on the potential sources of the linguistic
features under study. Choosing these specific creoles is not random: All three creoles are lusophone
but both CVC and GBC are viewed as historically-related creoles. As such, one would predict that the
evolution of their morphology would be very similar to each other but distinct from that of ST. This part
of the paper shows, however, that CVC and GBC display similarities but also major differences in the
morphological properties between them as well as important overlaps with ST. This leads us to tease
apart which properties are the results of superstratal and substratal influences, the outcome of UGbased tendencies or both.
Accounting for morphological and morphosyntactic variation in Creoles
– is it always possible or even feasible?
Angela Bartens
University of Helsinki, Finland
The closely related English-based Creoles of San Andrés, Old Providence, and Nicaragua present
some areas of morphological and morphosyntactic variation which might point towards language
change due to decreolization, pressure from Spanish or language-internal tendencies.
I shall examine the areas of verbal morphosyntax and the allomorphy and collocation of personal
pronouns. In all three varieties, basilectal Creole TMA marking patterns coexist with superstratal
verbal morphosyntactic structures. Even the basic verbal form may present doublets. The personal
pronouns present allomorphy which in some cases can be attributed to a relative position on the
Creole cline and in others to morphonological factors. But there are also cases of variation which
appear totally fortuitous.
I am arguing that variation is not always diagnostic of linguistic including typological change, at least
not judging from the existing recent diachronic data on the varieties in question (cf. Holm 1978 and
Washabaugh 1974) and that code-mixing (Muysken 2000) as well as the constant reaffirmation of
one’s identity (LePage & Tabouret-Keller 1985) might constitute valuable leads – presuming, of
course, that attempting to account for variation is a worthwhile endeavour in the first place (cf.
Freeland 2004:124).
References
Freeland, Jane (2004): “Linguistic Rights and Language Survival in a Creole Space. Dilemmas for
Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast Creoles”. In: J. Freeland & D. Patrick (eds.): Language Rights and
Language Survival: Sociolinguistic and Sociocultural Perspectives. Manchester, U.K.: St. Jerome
Publishing.
Holm, John Alexander (1978): The English Creole of Nicaragua’s Miskito Coast: It’s Sociolinguistic
History and a Comparative Study of it’s Lexicon and Syntax. University of London Doctoral
dissertation.
LePage, Robert B. & Andrée Tabouret-Keller (1985): Acts of identity. Creole-based approaches to
language and ethnicity. Cambridge: CUP.
Muysken, Pieter (2000): Bilingual speech: a typology of code-mixing. Cambridge:CUP
Washabaugh, William (1974): Variability in Decreolization on Providence Island,Colombia. Wayne
State University Ph.D. dissertation.
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The use of definite DETs in Mauritian Creole: has all been said?
Corinna Bartoletti
Università per Stranieri di Perugia, Italia
The present work presents quantitative and qualitative results concerning the discourse function of the
three [+definite] determiners in a small corpus (c.a. 25.000 words) of modern spoken Mauritian French
Creole. The determiners are the following:
a) the demonstrative sa ;
b) the morphologically discontinuous demonstrative sa…la;
c) the post-nominal marker la.
Apart from the diachronic account in Baker (2003) and the observations in Bollée 2004, no systematic
research has been conducted on corpus data; nevertheless the literature on MC determiners has been
primarily concerned with the problem of the categorization of the marker la.
In the literature, la has been (implicitly) analysed as a weak demonstrative by Bollée (2004), as a
definiteness marker (Baker 2003), a specificity marker (Guillemin 2007) or both as definiteness and
specificity marker (Syea 2007). Considering the assumption that categorization is not a necessary
prerequisite in describing the way certain grammatical elements do function in a given language
(Haspelmath 2007), the present study is focused on a systematic discovery of the ways in which the
three determiners la, sa…la and sa are concretely used in oral semi-planned discourse, aiming to
investigate the functionality of the markers both qualitatively and quantitatively and, ultimately, to
reconsider the question of the labelling of la in a French/Creole comparative perspective.
L’aspiration du /s/ en créole mauricien: un phénomène particulier
Corinna Bartoletti
Università per Stranieri di Perugia, Italia
Guillaume Fon Sing
Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), France
On se propose ici d’attirer l’attention sur un phénomène qui a lieu dans les (registres informels?) du
créole mauricien (CM) et qui concerne le déictique sa (déterminant et pronom) en tant qu’unité
indépendante et en tant qu’unité contenue dans le mot koumsa (fr. “comme ça”).
L’examen d’un corpus oral suffisamment étendu (50.000 mot environ) permet de constater que ledit
morphème (dans ses deux formes libre et « contenue » dans le mot « koumsa ») est intéressé par
deux réalisations phonétiques : d’une partie la réalisation « standard » en tant que [sa] et d’une autre
partie une réalisation avec aspiration de la sifflante initiale, en donnant lieu à [ha].
Du première vue, on serait tentés d’analyser ce phénomène du côté phonétique. D’abord l’aspiration
de /s/ est un phénomène d’affaiblissement tout à fait “naturel” (Dressler 1985) dont on retrouve une
genèse indépendante dans plusieurs langues. Mis à part le très connu passage du protoindoeuropéen */s/ au grec /h/ on peut citer, inter alia, la réalisation allophonique de /s/ en [h] dans les
dialectes de l’Italie du Nord (Rohlfs 1968; Sanga 1984; Benozzo 2004) ou dans certaines variétés de
l’espagnol (Morris 2000). Deuxièmement, que le facteur fréquence puisse favoriser un changement
phonétique par rapport à une seule unité lexicale est un fait désormais unanimement accepté (Bybee
2001). Néanmoins, au dépit d’une plausible origine phonétique, dans le cas du CM il semblerait
plutôt de nous trouver en face à un phénomène de variation libre et, comme quelqu’un a nous
suggéré, « étrange » du morphème sa. En premier lieu de phénomènes d’aspiration ne se vérifient
nulle part dans le système phonétique/phonologique du mauricien et l’aspiration de /s/ dans le
morphème sa en constituerait donc la première manifestation. Si cela, en fait, ne serait guère
problématique ce qui est le plus étonnant c’est les conditions d’occurrence du phénomène : non
seulement c’est uniquement l’élément sa qui est concerné par la réalisation en [ha] mais cette
variante, chez un même locuteur et dans les mêmes contextes phonétiques, apparaît librement:
On peut aisément observer à partir de l’exemple suivant (qui pourrait être suivi de nombreux exemples
semblables), que, dans un contexte identique (V[+nasale] – V) on a une première occurrence de sa
sans aspiration et une deuxième occurrence avec aspiration:
dã sa rəportaʒ la / sitjasjõ bjẽ bjẽ grav dã lənor / məsjə tulsi ki u pe pãse lor la / eski seki nu fek
gete ãsam la // [...]
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e osi pur pur sej devers pli boku dilo dã rezervar laferm / e de lot kote nujsi nu ẽterese avek ban
foraʒ/ avek ban ti:m borhols kuma nu n tãde dã ha reportaʒla
Un emploi de la variante [ha] qui dépend d’un contexte purement phonétique semblerait donc à
écarter, sans que toutefois le phénomène, pour sa part, cesse de demander une interprétation située
dans une perspective interne au système.
En se referant à notre corpus de données orales notre but est pourtant de produire un tentative
d'éclaircissement par rapport aux fonctionnement de cette variation morphologique dans la dynamique
naturelle de la langue. Précisément, on tentera de répondre aux questions suivantes:
a) Peut on écarter avec certitude l’hypothèse que l’emploi de la variante [ha] se produit par un
conditionnement phonétique à la fois conditionné par la haute fréquence ?
b) On accepte l’hypothèse du prêt linguistique tout en étant donné qu’en bhojpuri ha est un véritable
démonstratif ? Et par conséquence, est il plausible que ce phénomène tire son origine d’une variété
rurale du CM qui s’est diffusée par la suite?
c) Si on accepte l’hypothèse b, peut on supposer un conditionnement discursif (lié par exemple au
statut de sa en tant qu’élément déictique) qui favorise l’occurrence de ce que à ce point là est à
appeler comme « variante libre [ha] » ?
Références sélectionnés
Bybee, Joan. 2001. Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dressler, W., 1985. Morphonology. Karoma: Ann Arbour.
Morris, R.E., 2000. Constraint Interaction in Spanish /s/-Aspiration: Three Peninsular Varieties. In:
Campos, H., et alii, 2000. Hispanic Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium: Papers from the 3rd
Hispanic Linguistic Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.
Rohlfs, G., 1968. Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, vol I, Fonologia, trad. It.
Torino: Einaudi.
Sanga, G., 1984. Dialettologia lombarda. Lingua e cultura popolari. Pavia: Aurora.
Tonal mobility in Krio and Saramaccan
Mamadou Bassene
University of Minnesota, USA
Studies in tonology have shown that tones are not always stable and that they often spread beyond
the units in which they occur underlyingly. This paper examines the tonal systems of Krio, an Englishbased creole spoken in Sierra Leone (West Africa) and Saramaccan, another English-based creole
spoken in Suriname (South America). The paper focuses on the mobility of both high tone and low
tone in both languages and the main objective is to propose a unified account for these processes. An
analysis of utterances revealed that in both languages tone spreading is motivated by an alignment
constraint (ALIGN-T) and that this constraint is outranked by ANCHORING since tones do not spread
throughout the entire utterances.
The pragmatics of Berber and Songhay vocabulary in Tagdal: a mixed language
Carlos Benítez-Torrez
SIL International
Tagdal, spoken in modern-day Niger by an ethnically-Berber (Tuareg) group called the Igdalan, is a
mixed language in the Northern Songhay family. Mixed languages, unlike creoles, prototypically arise
in “a contact situation involving just two languages, where there is widespread bilingualism…”
(Thomason 2001:197). In this paper, I outline several ways in which vocabulary of Songhay origin
interacts with vocabulary of Berber origin in order to form a single language. First, I give several
examples of how verb roots of Songhay origin interact with verb roots of Berber origin, and for which
reasons. Second, I give examples of how nouns of Songhay origin interact with nouns of Berber origin,
and give some reasons why. I come to the conclusion that speakers of Proto-Tagdal were bilingual in
both Songhay and their former Berber language, and that the shift from Berber to Songhay was most
likely done on purpose (Benítez-Torres:2008). Furthermore, the shift toward Songhay took place in a
relatively short period of time (perhaps 25-30 years). In other words, Tagdal had an abrupt genesis
(Thomason 2007:55). The data reveals that the ancestors of modern-day Tagdal speakers shifted to a
variety of Songhay that served as a language of wider communication. As such, it lacked the
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necessary vocabulary to function as a vernacular language. Therefore, whenever Songhay lacked a
necessary vocabulary item, Proto-Tagdal speakers simply interted a word of Berber origin.
References
Benítez-Torres, Carlos M. 2008. Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology in Tagdal (Northern
Songhay): a Case of Language Mixing. In Selected Proceedings of the 38th Conference on African
Linguistics. ed. Fiona McLaughlin, Matondo Masungu, and Eric Potsdam. Somerville, Ma.: Cascadilla
Proceedings Project.
Thomason, Sara. 2001. Language contact: an introduction. Washington, DC: Georgetown University
Press.
What primeval soup does the Afrikaans demonstrative paradigm derive from?
Hans den Besten
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands/ Stellenbosch University, South Africa
The Afrikaans demonstrative system seems to be a transmogrified version of the Dutch/German one.
Strange though it may sound this his never been discussed in the literature – but for one topic: the
new demonstratives hierdie and daardie (lit.) ‘here the/that’ and ‘there-the/that’ respectively.
Given the loss of the category gender in the Afrikaans grammatical system one would expect the
following paradigm for definite determiners and demonstrative pronouns: die ‘the’, dié ‘that, those’
dese/dees ‘this, these’ and dit ‘this’ and dat ‘that’. However, dese/dees only survives in some frozen
expressions and dat is restricted to the textual juxtaposition of dit vs. dat. Furthermore:
Dié, which in Dutch only has a distal interpretation can easily receive a proximate reading in Afrikaans
as in dié week ‘this week’.
Dit, which in Dutch has a proximate reading, can easily be read (b1) as a distal demonstrative and (b2)
as a substitute for du. het ‘it’.
It is unclear why is it hierdie ‘this, these’ [lit. ‘here-the/that’] and not diehier (the expected Germanic
form).
th
In early 20 century Khoekhoe Afrikaans dit/dat could serve as a demonstrative determiner (e.g. dit
man ‘that man’) and possibly also as a definite article (e.g. dat byl ‘the axe’).
In my talk I will try to sketch a possible solution on the basis of the assumption that the Afrikaans
demonstrative paradigm can be best understood as a compromise between Cape Dutch and Cape
Dutch Pidgin. Factors that played a role are: (1) the phonological change from dat to dit (2) the
exclusion of weak pronouns in Afrikaans (3) the use if possessive se in new determiners (4)
ambiguities in the Dutch paradigm (5) substrate semantics.
Syllable Onsets in Haitian and Saramaccan: between substrate and superstrate
Parth Bhatt
University of Toronto, Canada
This paper examines the relative frequency of occurrence of word initial syllable onsets in Haitian,
Saramaccan, Gen, French and English.
Taking as a starting point the syllabic parameter model proposed by Blevins (1995), and applied to
thirty six Creoles by Klein (2006), this paper will examine the attested word initial syllable onsets in
Haitian and Saramaccan and compare the results to those obtained for their common substrate
language Gen, and their respective superstrate languages French (for Haitian) and English (for
Saramaccan). It is argued that the syllabic parameter model is empirically misleading since it only
allows one to state whether or not a given language allows or disallows a particular parameter such as
complex onsets, but provides no details on the actual properties of the parameter.
The results presented are based on a study of word initial onsets found in Valdman’s (1981) Haitian
Creole-English-French Dictionary, Pazzi’s (1981) Dictionnaire de la langue GEN, and Rountree et al.’s
(2000) Saramaccan English Word list. Data for English and French are taken from The Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary and the Petit Robert dictionary. Results show that when one takes into account the
actual attested consonant combinations and their relative frequency, the validity of the claim that these
two Creoles allows complex onsets needs to be reexamined. It is shown that the properties observed
8
in both Haitian and Saramaccan word initial onsets are neither attributable to properties of the
substrate or those of the superstrate but reflect a middle ground between the two.
References
Blevins, Juliette (1995) The syllable in phonological theory, In John Goldsmith (Ed.) The handbook of
phonological theory, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.206-244.
Klein, Thomas (2006) Diversity and complexity in the typology of syllables in Creole languages, ms.
Georgia Southern University.
Pazzi, Roberto (1981) Dictionnaire de la langue GEN, Lome: Institut national des sciences de
l’éducation.
Parkvall, Mikael (2000) Out of Africa, London, Battlebridge.
Rountree, S. Catherine, Jajo Asodanoe and Naomi Glock (2000) (Editors) Saramaccan-English word
list. Paramaribo: Instituut voor Taalwetenschap.
Valdman, Albert (1981) Haitian Creole-English-French Dictionary, Bloomington: Indiana University
Creole Institute.
Substrate vs. superstrate competition in creole genesis: what determines the winner?
Evidence from creole DP
Ekaterina Bobyleva,
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
The comparative analysis of DP elements in a number of Atlantic creoles (Jamaican, Sranan,
Saramaccan and Haitian) contrasted to their source languages (Aboh 2004, and subsequent works;
Bobyleva 2007) has demonstrated that DP system represents a vulnerable domain for language
transfer.
While the superstrates and some of the supposedly relevant substrates of the examined creoles are
amongst each other quite similar with regard to the DP organization, creoles display considerable
variation in the ways D-features such as specificity, definiteness and plurality are encoded in the DP
structure as well as in their formal licensing properties, i.e. the morphosyntax of the DP elements.
The variation observed in the DP domain appears to be the result of the fact that semantic features
and morphosyntactic representations of the DP elements of superstrate and substrate languages
combine differently in the DP elements of the emerging creoles.
In my current research I amass the empirical data on a sample of fifteen creoles:
area
lexifier
Portuguese
Spanish
English
French
Dutch
Atlantic
Other
Cape Verdean
Saõtomense
Papiamentu
Palenquero
Jamaican
Sranan
Haitian
Antillean
Berbice
Negerhollands
Korlai
Chabacano
Tok Pisin
Mauritian
Afrikaans
The comparative analysis of DP on a larger sample, which includes creoles with typologically different
substrates, allows us to go beyond the observation that creole DPs combine the properties of
superstrate and substrate languages, and to address the following more general questions:
Do some D-features get to be expressed in creole languages more often than others?
Are some morphosyntactic realizations of the D-features being selected into creoles more frequently
than others?
And if yes, then
What are the factors that determine the strength and weakness of the competing D-features and their
morphosyntactic realizations?
9
References
Aboh, Enoch O. 2004. Toward a Modular Theory of Creole Genesis. Paper presented at the
International Joint Conference of the SCL-SPCL-ACBLPE on Caribbean and Creole Languages 11-15
August 2004.
Bobyleva, Ekaterina. 2007. Determiner phrase in Atlantic creoles. Acomparative approach to creole
genesis. In: Toegepaste Taalweteschap in Artikelen 77. 125-135.
Tense variation on Bequia – grammatical and discourse constraints
Agata Daleszynska
The University of Edinburgh, UK
Tense mood and aspect (TMA) has long been considered a category which most visibly differentiates
Atlantic creoles from other non-creole varieties. While some studies have hypothesized the existence
of universal, cross-creole constraints of the TMA (Bickerton 1975, 1981), others have shown that
utilization of the TMA forms is highly contextual and multi-functional (Patrick 1999, Hackert 2004).
Analysis of the past tense system within the creole spoken on Bequia Island (St. Vincent and the
Grenadines) shows a plethora of strategies for expressing the past but highlights the verb stem (1)
and the inflected verb (2) as the most frequently used ones.
(1) The other day I tell Tony, I say “boy you see this place how it looking we getting rain”.
(2) We had nice days growing up man.
The paper focuses on the alteration between these two variants in three different communities on
Bequia (Hamilton, The Southside, Mount Pleasant) and aims to establish which grammatical and
discourse-specific constraints most significantly influence speakers’ choice of variants. For this
purpose a sub-sample of 3500 past tense expressions from the three villages was analysed by a
multivariate statistical package Goldvarb X (Sankoff et al. 2005). The following factor groups have
been included in the analysis: stativity, grammatical aspect, discourse grounding, lexical collocations
(300 different verbs were examined), transitivity and other. The results confirm the hypothesis that the
discourse-pragmatic factors, such as discourse grounding highly contribute to the temporal
organisation of grammar across the villages. While the influence of the grammatical constraints for this
variation turned out to be different in the three communities, the effect of discourse factors appears to
be more consistent. This result confirms the initial observation that the functions of the two variants in
question operate not only on grammatical but also discourse-specific level.
References
Bickerton, Derek. 1975. Dynamic of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hackert, Stephanie. 2004. Urban Bahamian Creole: System and variation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Meyerhoff, Miriam, Jack Sidnell and James Walker. 2005. “Varieties of English on Bequia (Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines): A Social and Linguistic Overview.” Unpublished MS.
Meyerhoff, Miriam and James A. Walker. 2007. The persistence of variation in individual grammars:
Copula absence in ‘urban sojourners’ and their stay-at-home peers, Bequia (St Vincent and the
Grenadines). Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(3): 346-366.
Patrick, Peter L. 1999. Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Price, Neil. 1988. Behind the Planter’s Back: Lower class responses to marginality in Bequia Island, St
Vincent. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Caribbean.
Rickford, John R. 1988. Dimensions of a Creole Continuum. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Sankoff, David, Sali Tagliamonte and Eric Smith. 2005. Goldvarb X: A multivariate analysis
application. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto/Department of Mathematics, University of
Ottawa.
Walker, James A. and Miriam Meyerhoff. 2006. Zero Copula in the Caribbean: Evidence from Bequia.
American Speech 81: 146-63.
10
Alala! Konmsaminm-minm! Reduplication in Réunion Creole, and in the French-based creoles
of the Indian Ocean.
Aymeric Daval-Markussen
Aarhus University, Denmark
Reduplication is a widespread phenomenon among creole languages and has been described
extensively, though not all varieties have received equal attention. Réunion Creole is one such variety.
Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to provide an exhaustive description of the functions served
by reduplication in Réunion Creole, based on a corpus of contemporary written texts. This descritpion
will then serve as the background for a comparative survey of reduplication in the French-based Indian
Ocean creoles.
In the second part of the paper, particular attention will be paid to the phenomenon in Malagasy, one
of the major substrate languages that influenced the creole langauges of the area in their formative
period. Thus, this will offer the opportunity of assessing to which extent particular reduplicative
constructions are relatable to a common source, following Kouwenberg & LaCharité’s (2003) credibility
hierarchy for substrate claims.
Preliminary literature
Armand, A. (1987) Dictionnaire kréol rénioné-français. Saint-André: Océan Editions.
Bakker, P. & Parkvall, M. (2005). Reduplication in Pidgins and Creoles. In Hurch (ed.) Studies on
Reduplication.
Baker, P. (2003). Reduplication in Mauritian Creole with notes on reduplication in Réunion Creole. In
Kouwenberg (ed.) Twice as Meaningful.
Baker, P. & Corne, C. (1982). Isle de France Creole: affinities and origins. Ann Arbor: Karoma.
Baker, P. & Corne, C. (1986). Universals, Substrata and the Indian Ocean Creoles. In Muysken &
Smith (eds.) Substrata versus Universals in Creole Genesis.
Bollée, A. (2003). Reduplication in Seychelles Creole. In Kouwenberg (ed.) Twice as Meaningful.
Chaudenson, R. (1974). Le lexique du parlercréole de la Réunion. Paris: Champion.
Corne, C. (1999). From French to Creole. London: Westminster Creolistics Series 5.
Greenberg, J.H. (1978). Universals of Human Language. Volume 3. Word Structure. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Hurch, B. (2005). Studies on Reduplication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Keenan, E.L. & Razafimamanjy, J.P. (1996). Reduplication in Malagasy. Paper presented at the 3rd
annual meeting of the AFLA, Los Angeles, April 1996.
Keenan, E.L. & Polinsky, M. (2001). Malagasy. In Spencer & Zwicky (eds.) The Handbook of
Morphology.
Kouwenberg, S. (ed.) (2003) Twice as Meaningful. London: Battlebridge.
Kouwenberg, S. & LaCharité, D. (2001). The Iconic Interpretations of Reduplication: Issues in the
Study of Reduplication in Caribbean Creole Languages. European Journal of English Studies 5(1):5980.
Kouwenberg, S. & LaCharité, D. (2003) The Meanings of „more of the same“: Iconicity in reduplication
and the evidence for substrate transfer in the genesis of Caribbean Creole languages. In Kouwenberg,
S. (ed.) Twice as Meaningful.
Kiyomi, S. (1995). A new approach to reduplication: a semantic study of noun and verb reduplication in
the Malayo-Polynesian languages. Linguistics 33:1145-1167.
Moravcsik, E.A. (1978). Reduplicative Conctructions. In Greenberg (ed.) Universals of Human
Language.
Muysken, P. & Smith, N. (eds.) (1986). Substrata versus Universals in Creole Genesis. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Nout Lang, issues 3 (2000), 4 (2001), 6 (July 2002), 7 (June 2003) and 8 (February 2004). TerreSainte (Réunion): Met Ansanm.
Parkvall, M. (2003). Reduplication in the Atlantic Creoles and other contact languages. In
Kouwenberg, S. (ed.) Twice as Meaningful.
Rajaonarimanana, N & Vérin, P. (2001). Grammaire moderne de la langue Malgache. Paris:
L’asiathèque.
Spencer, A. & Zwicky, A.M. (eds.) (2001). The Handbook of Morphology. London: Blackwell.
Staudacher-Valliamée, G. (2004). Grammaire du créole Réunionnais. Saint-Denis (Réunion): Sedes.
11
On the structuring role of grammaticalized morpho-syntactic features
Viviane Deprez,
Rutgers University, USA
The paper proposes a comparative analysis of French Lexifier Creole (FLC) nominal constituents (NC)
and argues that the variations observed in the distribution of their determiners result from the differing
grammaticalization patterns of their morpho-syntactic features, specifically person and number.
FLC NC present both a notable uniformity in their determiner inventory -- most FLC have as indefinite
determiner en/yon derived from the French un, as definite la, and as demonstrative sa/ta (la) -- but the
syntactic distribution of these forms varies greatly across FLC as illustrated in table 1, with some
notable and constant exceptions. These striking similarities and differences raise important empirical
and theoretical questions at the core of current theorizing on linguistic variation. Do the observed order
variations reflect distinctions in the functional architecture of nominal constituents, or do FLC DP have
a single common underlying functional architecture? If so, how can the observed variation be
accounted for? The paper argues for an analysis of the observed distributional variety in FLC NC built
on two central assumptions: 1) That FLC NC all have a common basic structure and 2) that the
observed variations stem from extensive but highly constrained phrasal movements inside the
proposed NC architecture that are driven by differences in the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic features of superficially similar determiners. I first provide evidence for a common underlying
architecture for FLC NC paralleling in essential respects the functional architecture developed for DP
within the recent generative literature. Much of the order variation observed among the FLC
determiners can be predicted from their status as lexical specifiers (XP) or as functional heads (Xo), a
choice that, I argue, reflects the variable degree of grammaticalization of their person/ number
features. Grammaticalization is here theoretically re-interpreted as a change in the interpretability of
morpho-syntactic features within Chomsky Minimalist Framework: Interpretable lexical features that
provide valuation (goal) become un-interpretable functional features seeking valuation (probe).
0
Accordingly, a determiner with interpretable features merges in a Spec position ( Det H XP) and
0
values a corresponding un-interpretable features in one of the head H of the DP architecture, while a
determiner with un-interpretable features merges as a functional head (probe) that triggers
checking/valuation through XP movement to its Spec, resulting in a constituent final position (XP Det
t) . The paper motivates this interpretation of grammaticalization by a detailed semantic comparison of
FLC determiners. The grammaticalization of definiteness is shown to involve an increased
dependence of ‘determined reference’ on the discourse context (Farkas 2002) modeled as the loss of
interpretability of a person feature. The grammaticalization of number correlates with a change from
cardinal to functional plurality.
Table 1
Reunion C
Seychelles C
Mauritian C
St Lucie
Martinique C
Guadeloupe C
MesoLouisiana C
Dfpl/Dmpl (PL)> NP > (def)
Dem PL > NP
Dem PL > NP > Def
PL > NP >Dem Def
PL> NP > Dem Def
PL > NP > Def Dem
DefPL> NP > Dem(def)
Le/se/(bann)NP (la)
Sa bann NP
Sa bann NP-la
Se NP sa-la
Se NP-ta-la,
Se NP-la-sa
Le NP sa-la
BasiLouisiana C
Guyana C
Haitian C
NP > Dem PL
Dem NP > PL Def
NP > Dem Def/PL
NP-(sila) ye
Sa NP- ye-la
NP-sa- (l)a/yo
A comparative perspective on the morphosyntax of Jamaican and Trinidadian English in the
context of the respective Creole continua
Dagmar Deuber
University of Freiburg, Germany
This paper analyses selected areas of morphosyntax in relatively informal spoken Jamaican and
Trinidadian English. The data consist of samples of conversations from the two Caribbean
components of the International Corpus of English (ICE), ICE-Jamaica and ICE-Trinidad and Tobago.
12
The varieties of English are compared with each other as well as with Creole varieties along the
respective continua, to the extent that comparable data are available in the literature. The aim is to
ascertain to what extent informal English is influenced by the Creoles. The features analysed are: whquestions, copula forms, past marking, agreement marking on verbs, and negation. Overt Creole
forms are found to be mostly rare in the ICE data (e.g. past marker did). The main morphosyntactic
features that characterize the informal varieties of English are of the type that Allsopp (1996: lvi) has
described as “reductions of English structure”. Some features are of course shared with informal or
non-standard varieties of English elsewhere, and some Creole constraints (i.e. on past marking of
certain morphological categories of verbs) are not operative at the level of the acrolect, but the Creoles
still seem to have an important influence on the peculiar set of features that occurs in each variety and
the extent to which they are used. In fact, informal English in the Caribbean can be said to be shaped
by the Creoles in a similar way as Standard English, which adheres to international norms relatively
closely in terms of morphosyntax, is shaped by the Creoles on the level of phonology, as Irvine (2008)
has shown for Jamaica. The paper concludes that the ICE data reflect the nature of English in the
Caribbean as the upper segment of different Creole continua.
References
Allsopp, Richard (1996). Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Irvine, Alison (2008). Contrast and convergence in Standard Jamaican English: the phonological
architecture of the standard in an ideologically bidialectal community. World Englishes 27: 9-25.
Relative Clauses in Krio and its English Superstrate – A Comparative Approach
Kristian Dyrvold
Umeå University, Sweden
In this paper I will investigate the origin of relative clauses in Krio. Using naturalistic data from modern
(post 1980) Krio, I will compare and contrast the relativisation systems of the Creole and its
superstrate, i.e. varieties of English. The study, which takes into account not only modern Standard
English but also historical and dialectal varieties of the language, will demonstrate that although there
are some differences in the way the varieties considered construct relative clauses, it appears that for
Krio, most aspects of this grammatical system can be directly or indirectly traced back to English
sources. The comparison, in addition to a better understanding of the questions of background and
origin, will also try to find out what mechanisms have been involved in the creolisation/restructuring
process, resulting in the present make-up of Krio’s relativisation system.
The counterfactual and its substrates in Belizean Creole
Geneviève Escure
University of Minnesota, USA
Belizean Creole (BC) has a special counterfactual structure that is not shared by all Caribbean
varieties, and may represent a continuity and transmission of the African substrate. In BC, the
counterfactual (irrealis) is expressed by a Past/Anterior + Future <me wan> preverbal combination as
shown below:
(1a)
(1b)
(1c)
if
dey
me
wan
dig
wan
ship
auta
de,
a
if
3P
ANT
FU
dig
a
ship
out.of there 1S
you
me
wan
ga
wan
lang
channel,
2S
ANT
FU
get
a
long
channel
den
an
me
wan
put
dat
san
op
de
then
3P
ANT
FU
put
that
sand up
there
'If you had dug out a ship out of that spot, I mean, you would have needed (to
excavate) a long channel, then you would have put that sand away up there'
mean
mean
African elements indicating futurity/irrealis and closely homophonous with this structure occur in
Ibibio/Efik, Kituba, Swahili, and generally in Bantoid languages.
It is hypothesized that the Belizean counterfactual is not a variant of English 'been,' but constitutes a
conservative reflex of ancestral languages, and can be explained in terms of the sociolinguistic history
13
of Belize, the origin and ethnicity of its African labor force and the potential impact of local interethnic
contacts in Central America. Belize was not a plantation slave society. The relative isolation of
logwood camp slaves, and their limited contacts with whites facilitated the maintenance of African
elements. Even if the majority of slaves were native speakers of Gold Coast languages, it is likely that
they were fluent in one of several lingua francas that existed in Africa prior to their exile and that those
trade languages were maintained during their deportation and contributed to the development of
creole varieties in Central America.
References
Burdon, Sir John Alder. 1935. Archives of British Honduras. 3 vols. London: Sifton Praed & Company.
Essien, Okon. 1983. The tense system of Ibibio. Jonathan Kaye et al. (eds.) Current approaches to
African linguistics, Vol 2: 329-344. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Essien, Okon. 1987. The aspectual system of Ibibio. David Odden (ed.) Current approaches to African
linguistics, Vol 4: 151-166. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Faraclas, Nicholas. 1989. Cross River. John Bendor-Samuel (ed.). The Niger-Congo languages.
Lanham: University Press of America.
Saloné, Sukari. 1987. Unreality in Yoruba. David Odden (ed.) Current approaches to African
linguistics, Vol 4: 339-346. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Convergence and the African, Melanesian, and Indigenous Caribbean Substrates
of the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles
Nicholas Faraclas, Micah Corum, Lourdes González-Cotto, Cándida González-López, Pier Angeli
LeCompte, Jean Ourdy Pierre, Diana Ursulin, Aida Vergne, and Marta Viada
Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras
A survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the
Atlantic and Pacific reveals remarkable similarities, not only with the Benue-Kwa languages spoken
along the coast of West Africa from Ghana to the Cape, but also with the Austronesian and Papuan
languages spoken in Melanesia (Faraclas 1990) as well as with the Northern Arawakan languages
most closely related to the indigenous languages once spoken in the insular Caribbean (Viada 2007).
An obvious explanation for this coincidence would be some kind of convergence of influences from
these three sources and others (such as non-standard dialects of English) in addition to the operation
of universals. Such an account, however, would have to address questions such as how such
convergent influences could have operated in real time and real space.
For example, how can we reconcile differences in the onset of the period of influence from Benue–
th
th
th
th
Kwa languages (from the 15 -16 centuries) with that of the Northern Arawakan languages (16 -17
th
th
centuries) and that of the Melanesian languages (18 -19 centuries)? And how was contact
established and maintained over the tens of thousands of kilometers that separate West Africa, the
Caribbean, and Melanesia? To answer these and related questions, we examine some underresearched aspects of the socio-historical context for language contact in these three regions from the
15th century onward. The scenarios that emerge from this fresh look at the matrix of colonial era
creolization not only allow, but actually favor the global convergence of substrate language influences
on the Atlantic and Pacific creoles.
References
Faraclas, N. (1990) From Old Guinea to Papua New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Nigerian Pidgin
and Tok Pisin. In J. Verhaar. ed. Melanesian Pidgin and Tok Pisin. Amsterdam: Bejamins. 91-169.
Viada Bellido de Luna, M. (2008) Influences from the Indigenous Languages of the Caribbean on the
Grammars of Caribbean Creoles. PhD Dissertation, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.
Possession et syntaxe de la phrase en créole haïtien
Dominique Fattier
Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France
Résumé de communication
L’enquête de terrain effectuée pour l’Atlas linguistique d’Haïti (Fattier 1998) a permis de repérer
l’existence, dans certaines variétés populaires de créole haïtien, d’un type de phrase possessive, le
14
type comitatif, qui n’a pas à ma connaissance été signalé dans les travaux portant sur cette langue.
Ce type, particulièrement commun dans les langues africaines (d’après Creissels 2006: 101), ne
semble pas attesté en français.
Dans ma communication qui s’inscrit dans une perspective comparative (créole haïtien/langues
africaines, créole haïtien/français), il est question de syntaxe de la phrase et de possession en créole
haïtien. J’entends comme constructions possessives, les constructions qui signifient le rattachement
d’une entité (le « possédé ») à la sphère personnelle d’un individu (le « possesseur »), en faisant
largement abstraction de la nature précise de la relation entre les référents qui autorise à inclure le
possédé dans la sphère personnelle du possesseur, suivi ainsi la définition que propose Creissels
(2006: 97).
Bibliographie
Creissels, D. 2006. Syntaxe générale. Une introduction typologique 2. Lavoisier.
Fattier, D. 1998. Contribution à l’étude de la genèse d’un créole : L’Atlas linguistique d’Haïti, cartes et
commentaires. ANRT, collection Thèse à carte.
Fattier, D. 2000 : « Genèse de la détermination postnominale en haïtien : l’empreinte africaine »,
L’information grammaticale 85 : 39-46.
Gueron, J. & Zribi-Hertz, A. (éds.). 1998. La grammaire de la possession. Presses de l’Université
Paris X-Nanterre.
Glaude, H. 2006. Constructions possessives en créole haïtien. Mémoire présenté pour l’obention du
master de sciences du langage. Sous la direction du professeur A. Zribi-Hertz. Université Paris-8.
Haspelmath, M., König, E., Österreicher W., & Raible W. (éds.). 2001. Language Typology and
language Universals. 2vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Heine, B. 1997. Possession: Cognitive Sources, forces and grammaticalization. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
TMA markers in Haitian and Mauritian creoles: a comparative study
Guillaume Fon Sing
Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, France
Even if 1) the majority of the linguistic materials and resources initializing the grammatical systems of
th
th
the French Creoles (FC) come from 17 -18 French popular varieties spoken by the colonists– i.e. a
characteristic “feature pool” (Mufwene 2005)– and 2) the restructured forms relate to autoregulation
tendencies of French and linguistic appropriation strategies (Chaudenson 2003), FC present particular
intrasystemic evolutions, due among others to their “intern dynamics”, that makes them autonomous
languages whose intercomprehension and intelligibility between speakers of different territories do not
go without saying. Thus, despite a strong global systemic proximity, Haitian Creole (HC) in the
Caribbean and Mauritian Creole (MC) in the Indian Ocean present several phonic, lexical and
grammatical differences.
Concerning the semantic and syntactical functioning of the non-predicative verbs, we notice for
instance that:
the sentence li Ø gade televizyon in HC can mean “(s)he watched television” whereas MC requires a
marker for a past or accomplished event (li ti get televizjon or li (fi)n get televizjon);
contrary to MC, the French verb connaître has been reanalysed in HC as an habitual marker: konn
(e.g. li konn vin isi ledimanch “he uses to come here on Sunday”);
the combination après + aller gave birth in HC to a future unified morpheme: pral (e.g. m' pral benyen
“I am going to swim”) which is not morphed in MC (mo pe al bebem) and which, as a consequence,
appears to be less grammaticalized.
In this paper, I propose to analyse diachronically and synchronically the Tense-Mood-Aspect (TMA)
markers in HC and MC. To that aim, I will rely on a corpus data of old texts and modern audio
transcriptions as well as on the works of Bentolila (1987), Spears (1997) and Damoiseau (1994) for
HC and those of Baker (1972), Corne (1973) and Véronique (2001) for MC. Based on the modelling of
the two systems these researchers have tried to establish, I will present and analyse some contrastive
differences of these markers concerning their evolution as well as their communicative functions and
semantics in their respective contemporary usage.
References
Baker, Philip, 1972. Kreol: A Description of Mauritian Creole. London: C.Hurst & Company.
15
Bentolila, Alain, 1987. "Marques aspecto-temporelles en créole haïtien: de l'analyse synchronique à la
formulation d'hypothèses diachroniques", Linguistique 23.103-22.
Chaudenson, Robert, 2003. Les créoles: théorie, applications, implications. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Corne, Chris. 1973. "Tense and Aspect in Mauritian Creole", Te Reo 16.45-59.
Damoiseau, Robert, 1994. "Réflexions sur le fonctionnement du système aspecto-temporel du créole
haïtien", Linguistique 30.105-20.
Mufwene, Salikoko, 2005. Créoles, écologie sociale, évolution linguistique: cours donnés au Collège
de France durant l’automne 2003. L’Harmattan.
Spears, Arthur K., 1990. "Tense, Mood, and Aspect in the Haitian Creole Preverbal Marker System", in
John Victor Singler (ed.), Pidgin and Creole Tense-Mood-Aspect Systems. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 119-42.
Veronique, Daniel, 2001. "Temps, aspect et mode en mauricien", Information grammaticale 89, Mars
2001, 38-42.
A Comparison of the most salient features of French Creole Varieties
David Frank
SIL International
Based on intimate familiarity with one variety of French Creole, plus first-hand field work among
several other varieties, in addition to library research, this study proposes and compares a set of
salient structural features that identify French Creoles as a group but at the same time distinguishes
them from each other. Included in the comparison are phonological details, the pronoun set, the
structure of the noun phrase, and certain salient lexemes. In terms of phonology, of particular interest
is the FC equivalents of French /r/ and the French front rounded vowels. Of particular interest in the
noun phrase is the way that different French Creole varieties form plurals and possessives and attach
the definite determiner clitic. In terms of lexemes, the variant FC forms for 'thing', 'to have', 'to be born',
the copula, and the pronoun set are all criteria that can indicate closeness of one French Creole
variety to another. These structural details are combined with what we know about migration patterns
and other historical data to give an overall picture of how different strains of French Creole developed
in the New World.
English Historical Core Vocabulary Usage in Anglophone Carribean Creole
Iryna Galutskikh
Zaporozhye National University, Ukraine
In this study English historical core vocabulary (HCV) is understood as the corpus of lexemes that
have been part of English since Old English. Notable for systemic, communicative and evolutionary
supremacy in language it survives in English Standard varieties and actively contributes to their
lexicons evolution being fully involved into regionalisms coinage (Skybina 1996; Skybina & Galutskikh
2007). In this research HCV evolution is traced throughout Caribbean English. It is hypothesized that
English HCV is the pivot of evolutionary processes accompanying English local lexicon formation in
Caribbean Creole, i.e. HCV both participates in highly dynamic processes of the formation of lexical
inventory of Anglophone Caribbean talk and slows down the speed of non-standard direction of
English evolution sometimes viewed as its degradation. The method applied for the hypothesis
verification consisted in four stages: 1) compiling HCV-based inventory of Caribbean English (DCEU
2003), 2) the analysis of specific ways and dynamics of regionalisms formation, 3) juxtaposition of the
course of HCV evolution in Caribbean Creole and in Standard Englishes, 4) interpretation of the
results obtained through the prism of the theory of language change.
References
DCEU. - Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage/ ed. by R.Allsopp. – Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad &
Tobago: University of West Indies Press, 2003.
Skybina, Valentyna. Nathional’no negomogenny yazyk i lexigographicheskaya praktika [Pluricentric
language and lexicographic issues]. - Zaporozhzhye: Vydavets’, 1996.
Skybina V., Galutskikh I. Core vocabulary: spring and/or anchor // Abstracts of the XVIIIth International
Conference on Historical Linguistics (August 6-11 2007). - Quebec, Montreal, 2007. P. 123.
16
Creole morphology and its origin
Stéphane Goyette
Brandon University, Canada
A number of scholars have in recent years (cf. most recently Holm 2008) paid closer attention to
bound morphemes in Creole languages, arguing that their presence invalidates theories stressing
reduction/loss of morphology in the transition from lexifier to creole. It should be noted that the mere
existence of bound morphemes in a Creole is considered sufficient evidence to refute the theory: if
one percent of the lexifier morphology is found in the Creole, the disappearance of the remaining
ninety-nine percent is seemingly deemed unproblematic. This presentation aims to show that a good
number of the bound morphemes used by Holm to exemplify this point exhibit behaviour far more
readily explicable through their having been borrowed rather than inherited from their lexifier.
Two cases in point are the pluralizer /s/ and the past participle suffix /du/, both of which are widely
found in Portuguese-based creoles, and both of which behave in a fashion quite alien to the cognate
morphemes in Portuguese, or indeed any Romance language (standard or dialectal), but quite similar
to borrowed Romance morphemes in non-Romance languages. The obvious conclusion –that in
Portuguese Creoles these morphemes must also be borrowed, rather than inherited- is all the more
plausible when it is considered that Creole languages in sociolinguistic settings wherein the prestige
language was not their respective lexifiers have indubitably borrowed many elements from said
prestige language, including bound morphemes. Moreover, the fact that there exists a positive
correlation between how early a pidgin or creole language was isolated from its lexifier and the
absence in said pidgin or creole language of bound morphemes originating from the lexifier (thus, the
English Creoles of Suriname, as well as Tok Pisin, which were both separated from English early, lack
any bound English morpheme) provides indirect evidence supporting the theory that much if not all of
Creole morphology is borrowed rather than inherited.
References
Holm, John. 2008. “Creolization and the fate of inflections”. In Stolz, Thomas & Dik Bakker & Rosa
Salas Palomo (Eds.) Aspects of Language Contact. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 299324.
Junggrammatiker and younger languages: how Creole languages can invigorate traditional
concepts of historical linguistics
Anthony Grant
Edge Hill University, UK
It is often assumed aprioristically that creolistics and traditional models of historical linguistics (as
practised, for instance, in the more traditional Indo-European modes as advocated by the
th
Neogrammarians or Junggrammatiker who were centred on the University of Leipzig in the late 19
century) have few insights to share with one another and that they are irrelevant to one another’s
concerns. This is emphatically not the case. In this paper I will draw on structural and lexical data from
a subset of Creole languages (Saramaccan, Mauritian, Angolar); these are younger languages which
take most of their basic lexicon from English and/or from Romance languages.
I will examine one of the most important findings in two centuries’ study of the theory of language
change, namely the role of synapomorphies or (positive) exclusively shared innovations, an empirically
well-grounded finding (Brugmann 1884; Dyen 1953) whose importance in historical linguistics is
periodically recognised from time to time.
Suported by the conceptual framework presented in McWhorter (2005) I show that the role of
synapomorphies is as valid and as informative in the histories of Creole languages as in any other
natural language, even though inflectional morphology, the usual locus for this development in nonCreole languages, is often sparse in Creole languages. This suggests that recognising this fact will
enable us, inter alia, to understand the patterns of diversification and the subgrouping cladistics of
Creole languages much more clearly than has often hitherto been the case, and its very potency in
Creole language studies highlights its enduring importance in historical linguistics. In contrast Creole
languages are often but not always exceptional (when viewed against non-Creole languages) in terms
of receptivity to elements (especially lexical elements) from other languages, and also their frequently
very rapid speed of structural change and often structural elaboration or complexification. Yet the
17
operation of these factors does not preclude Creole languages from being classified clasistically with
other Creoles with the same chief lexifier.
As a corollary I sketch structural features of the subset of Creole languages which are Creole-internal
innovations whose presence cannot be accounted for simply by reference to the histories of their
lexifier languages. I argue that the evidence from these features for assuming that these languages
represent the independent complexification and structural elaboration of what were formerly pidgins is
overwhelming.
References
Brugmann, Karl. 1884. ‘Zur Frage nach den Verwandschaftsverhältnissen der indogermanischen
Sprachen.’ Internationale Zeitschrift für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft 1: 226-256.
Dyen, Isidore. 1953. Review of Malgache et maanjan: une comparaison linguistique, by Otto Christian
Dahl. (Published Oslo: Egede-Institutet, 1951.) Language 29: 577-590.
McWhorter, John H. 2005. Defining Creole. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS): first results.
Martin Haspelmath (MPI EVA Leipzig, Germany), Magnus Huber (University of Giessen, Germany),
Susanne Michaelis (MPI EVA Leipzig, Germany), Philippe Maurer (Switzerland)
In this paper, we report on progress made by the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures
(APiCS) project over the last year. The questionnaire, consisting of 120 grammatical features
formulated in detail, as well as full segmental information, has been completed by over 50 specialists.
The datasets are currently undergoing careful review by the editors and revision by the authors. All the
data will be published online in 2010.
The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS) was originally inspired by the World
Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), and one of the goals of APiCS is to make it possible to readily
compare the structures of pidgin and creole languages with the world-wide situation and with the
substrate languages. While pidgin and creole specialists typically have an excellent knowledge of the
lexifier language and also know a lot about substrate languages, the extent to which the
corresponding patterns are widespread or not in the world as a whole is often still little known.
At this point of the project, we already have comparative structural data for a fairly large number of
pidgin and creole languages so that we can approach the question of similarities among these contact
languages from a systematic quantitative perspective. We will illustrate the possibilities of the APiCS
database by presenting overviews of the global distribution of several feature values. We will show a
selection of preliminary APiCS maps, based on over 50 pidgin/creole languages. About half of these
features will be directly comparable to features in WALS, so that the situation in pidgins and creoles
can be compared directly with the world-wide situation.
Negation and Negative Concord in Mauritian
Fabiola Henri-Martin
University Paris Diderot-Paris 7, France
This paper provides an analysis of negation and negative concord in Mauritian. As is the case in many
French-Based Creoles in general, the discontinuous morphemes ne...pas have collapsed to a sole
marker napa>pa which appears preverbally. Compared to French, where constituent negation has
been analyzed as being adjoined to non-finite verbs and sentential negation as a complement of finite
verbs (Abeille and Godard 1997; Kim and Sag 2002). The fact that pa display similar behavior with
negative adverbs like zame-never and nepli-no-more provides an empirical argument in favor of a
head-adjunct construction. More specifically, besides the fact that it alternates with other (negative)
adverbs, it has adverbial properties in that it has scope over a coordination of VPs, it needs a host to
adjoin to and is excluded before a VP ellipsis site, and can be separated from its head by
other preverbal adverbs.
(1) a.
Zan pa/nepli
pou/pe
manze.
John NEG/no-more IRR/PROG eat
‘John won’t/will no more eat/ John isn’t/is no more eating.’
18
b.
c.
Zan pa get televizion ou lir
okenn liv.
John NEG watch TV
or read any
book
‘John does not watch TV or read any books.
To
pa
vremem malad?
2sg
NEG really sick
‘You’re not really sick?’
With respect to the data, I assume that pa adjoins to a VP (SF or LF) or a PRED+ element in cases of
predicative phrases and lexicalize negative counterparts of the perfective inn, the auxiliary ena, the
verbs anvi and ale and the adverb ankor as irregular negative verbs/adverb pa’nn, p’ena, p’anvi, p’al,
1
and p’ankor which appears due to phonological reduction Furthermore, Mauritian is a strict negative
concord language in that sentential negation obligatorily co-occurs with N-words like personn-no one,
nanye-nothing, okenn-any2.
(2) a.
b.
c.
Kisannla pou vini? Personn.
Who
IRR come? No-one
‘Who will come? No one.’
Personn pa
pou vini. NC
No-one NEG IRR come. LF
‘No one will come.
Personn pa
sorti
okenn par.
DN or NC
No-one NEG come.LF no
where
‘No one comes from nowhere.’
The analysis of N-words as inherently negative existential quantifiers (Falaus 2007) is to be favored:
N-words like personn or okenn cannot appear in nonnegative contexts and double negation readings
cannot be accounted for if they are not considered as being inherently negative. An analysis of those
as polarity items cannot explain why they cannot be licensed in unbounded dependencies. A polyadic
analysis (Swart and Sag 2002) will account for the fact that an N-word will obligatorily occur with the
negative marker and convey an NC reading while two or more N-words can possibly provide two
readings- DN and NC.
1
The same type of analysis is given to English will and do which have negative counterparts won’t
and don’t
2
The fact that we call personn, nanye and okenn n-words has to do with the fact that they have
a negative meaning when used alone and when in co-occurrence with sentential negation, a single
negation is available.
References
Abeille, A. and D. Godard (1997). The syntax of french negative adverbs. In D. Forget, P.
Hirschbuhler, F. Martineau, and M.-L. Rivero (Eds.), Negation and polarity : Syntax and Semantics,
pp. 1–27. John benjamins Publishing Company.
Falaus, A. (2007). Le paradoxe de la double negation. Linguisticae Investicationes 26(La négation
dans les langues romanes), 75–97.
Kim, J.-B. and I. A. Sag (2002). Negation without head movement. Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory 2(20), 339–412.
Swart, H. D. and I. Sag (2002). Negation and negative concord in romance.Linguistics and Philosophy
25, 373–417.
Comparative and sociohistorical evidence in the search for the elusive Virginia Creole
Magnus Huber, Linden Müller
University of Giessen, Germany
In this work-in-progress report, we will present comparative and sociohistorical evidence that points
towards the (non-)existence of a Creole in 18th century Virginia (VA). Although the possibility of early
creolization in Virginia has been investigated (e.g. Miller 1987) or at least hinted at by a small number
of scholars (e.g. Sutcliffe 1999, Winford 1997: 320-321), conclusive direct evidence for such a Creole
has yet to be found.
19
We will start by comparing the socio-demography of the 18th century South Carolina (SC) Low
Country, an area where the existence of a Creole (Gullah) is undisputed, with that of VA. The aim is to
establish whether the socio-historical conditions in early VA favoured the emergence and development
of a Creole. For example, in 1770 the percentage of the black population in VA was only 42% while it
was as high as 60.5% in SC. However, we argue that such state-wide figures are uninformative
because creolization happened on the plantation level and show that the percentage of the black
population in some VAn counties was actually high enough to lead to creolization.
Next, we will consider whether a late 18th century Virginian diaspora variety (the so-called Nova
Scotian Settlers who arrived in Sierra Leone in 1792) points to the existence of a VA Creole. While
about a quarter of these Settlers came from SC and could therefore have introduced an early form of
Gullah to Sierra Leone, more than half actually came from VA. If Sierra Leonean Krio is considered to
be an offshoot of an American mainland Creole (Huber 2004), this could be an indication that there
must have been some sort of Creole input by the Settlers originating in VA.
The last part of this paper will look at textual and archival evidence suggestive of an early Creole in
VA. Sources in the form of 19th century slave letters obtained from the Virginia Historical Society,
slaves' correspondence with their masters (Miller 1978), and skeptical consideration of the WPA Slave
Narratives from VA comprises our initial body of evidence.
References
Huber, Magnus. 2004. "The Nova Scotia-Sierra Leone connection. New evidence on an early variety
of African American Vernacular English in the diaspora." Escure, Geneviève and Armin Schwegler
(eds.): Creoles, contact, and language change. Linguistic and social implications. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 67-95.
Miller, Michael I. 1987. "Evidence for a Virginia plantation Creole?" Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und
Linguistik 54: 184-201.
Miller, Randall M. (ed.). 1978. "Dear Master". Letters of a Slave Family. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Sutcliffe, David. 1999. "Creole in the ex-slave recordings and other complementary sources." Journal
of Pidgin and Creole Languages 14: 351-357.
Winford, D. 1997. "On the origins of African American Vernacular English – a creolist perspective. Part
I: The sociohistorical background." Diachronica 14: 305-344.
Papiamentu and Upper Guinea Creole: a diachronic analysis and comparison of their core
morphology
Bart Jacobs
Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany
This paper is concerned with the linguistic and historical relationships between Papiamentu (PA) and
the Upper Guinea branch of Portuguese Creole (UGPC) as spoken on the Santiago island of Cape
Verde and in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance and aims to strengthen the claim that these creoles
share their origins.
Lipski asserts that up to present “scholars are (...) evenly divided as to the Spanish vs. Portuguese
origins of Papiamento” (2005:282). Because of the controversy over its origins, it is safest to call PA
an Iberian based creole. However, as Kramer (2004:100) rightly comments: “Dieser glückliche
Terminus enthebt einen dennoch nicht der Suche nach einer Erklärung für die teils spanische, teils
portugiesische Prägung des Wortschatzes”.
Quint (2000:197), after exposing striking linguistic correspondences between PA and SCV on all levels
of the grammar, concludes that “le papiamento et le badiais sont étroitement apparentés et ont une
origine commune”. This claim, however, did not find any resonance in related publications: Lipski
(2005:285), for example, asserts that PA “is not clearly related to any West African creole”, while
Parkvall (2000:137), regarding PA’s origins, declares: “Relexification from an African Portuguese
Creole does not strike me as particularly likely, simply because the shared features are rather limited
in number”.
Remarkable is the absence of references to any of the striking correspondences between PA and
UGC in recent works concerned with placing PA in a cross-creole perspective (e.g. Maurer 2002,
2005, Kouwenberg & Ramos-Michel 2007). The present paper aims to fill this lacuna in the research
on PA’s origins.
To underpin the hypothesis that PA originated in Upper Guinea, the paper offers a diachronic analysis
of PA’s core derivational and inflectional morphology, an analysis that implies the comparison with
20
UGPC. Crucial supporting data is drawn from several Early PA texts stretching from 1775 to 1928,
some of which have only recently been published (e.g. Niewindt 1833, Conradi 1844). The paper
closes off with a presentation of little known historical data, which account for the linguistic transfer
from Upper Guinea to Curaçao.
The Field of Creole Phonology: Demarcation and Prospects
Thomas Klein
Georgia Southern University, USA
Smith’s (in press) claim that nothing novel can be learned about phonology from studying the
synchronic and diachronic phonologies of creole languages seems implausible.
In fact, the record shows that phonological theory has been informed by the phonologies of creole
languages. Examples are the alveolar velarization before liquids in Jamaican (likl ~ little) (Walsh
Dickey 1997), the consequences for the layering of prosodic categories from Jamaican reduplication
(Alderete 2000), and the surprising unmarkedness of labial patterns in Sri Lankan Creole Portuguese
(Hume & Tserdandelis 2003). Furthermore, the phonologically conditioned allomorphy of a/la in
Haitian is a test case for some fundamental concepts in Optimality Theory (Klein 2003, Bonet et al.
2007). This evidence shows that phonological theory has much to learn from (morpho)phonological
alternations in creole languages. Creole syllables exhibit a rich set of processes of vowel insertion
which have been analyzed to elucidate other languages (Uffmann 2007) and diachronic phonology
(Alber & Plag 2001). The intricate interactions of stress and tone in creole languages such as
Saramaccan and Papiamentu (see works by Good, Rivera-Castillo and others) also hold significant
lessons.
Fresh cases for phonological theory to contend with are presented using data from vowel insertion in
Wadmalaw Gullah (Jones-Jackson 1978), nasal velarization in Caribbean creoles (cf. Schneider et al.
2004), and stress shift in Ugandan Nubi (Wellens 2003).
Markedness is a central notion in theories of language and in creole studies. New theories of
phonological markedness continue to be developed (see de Lacy 2006, Hume 2008, Lombardi 2002).
This ongoing debate demonstrates the need to pursue important research questions in creole
phonology such as (1) Is it true that creole phonology is unmarked? and (2) What are the implications
of the answer to (1) for theories of phonological markedness?
This paper demonstrates that creole phonology is a field at least in the sense in which “Japanese
phonology” or “phonology of Ethiopian languages” are chapters in phonological theory (see Goldsmith
1995). This incipient field holds great promise for the advancement of phonological theory and for
creole linguistics.
Variation in the Use of Existentials on Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines)
Miriam Meyerhoff, James A. Walker
University of Edinburgh/ York University, Canada
Cross-linguistically, it is common to find existential (or presentational) constructions realised by verbs
of possession as well as equative verbs. Indeed, in some languages both options exist and can be
exploited as a sociolinguistic resource by the speech community. In this paper, we examine the
linguistic and sociolinguistic factors that condition the distribution of there BE type existentials and it
HAVE type existentials constructions in the varieties of English spoken on Bequia (St Vincent and the
Grenadines).
Drawing on a corpus of recordings made over a period of three years, we discuss the use of the two
existential types in the interview speech of forty-eight speakers from four villages on Bequia. There are
two salient points of variation. First is the choice of expletive subject (it vs. there), a feature shared
with other varieties of Caribbean English. Second is number agreement on the verb — ‘singular
agreement’ (1) vs. ‘plural agreement’ (2) — a feature found in existential constructions in varieties of
English more generally (Walker 2007). In this paper, we examine the distribution and conditioning of
both subject type and agreement, concentrating on the patterns of verb agreement.
1. There is/are N
Yeah, there is so jokes when you're in school you know. (BQ.005:621)
21
2. It has/have NP
I like it being alone and it have all kind of book I coulda read (BQ.020:542)
Our findings offer interesting perspectives on the structural and social nature of these variants. First,
the distribution of it HAVE and there BE variants is markedly different in different villages, consistent with
other work on Bequia (Walker & Meyerhoff 2006, Walker & Sidnell 2008, Daleszynska 2008). Second,
we find evidence that variation in the use of predicate BE may be the target of some sociolinguistic
awareness. Evidence for this comes from those individuals we refer to as ‘urban sojourners’
(Meyerhoff & Walker 2007, i.e. people who have spent substantial time away from Bequia), who have
systematised their preference for existentials, focusing (in the sense of Le Page & Tabouret-Keller
1985) either on an English there is/are pattern or on a creole it have. In the latter case, this focusing
corresponds with the loss of agreement characteristic of the urban sojourners’ stay-at-home peers.
These findings provide a novel insight into the management of the existentials, offering links to studies
of existential variation in other languages. Our data provides evidence of individual speakers
reanalysing existentials as (quasi-)lexical elements, rather than as grammatical constructions. The
lexical nature of existentials is well-documented in some varieties of English – the Bequia data
provides a window on the individual processes underlying that historical change.
From English belly to Krio bɛlɛ.
The role of metonymic drift and substrate cultural models
Sulayman Njie, Johan Nordlander
Umeå University, Sweden
Krio bɛlɛ, from English belly, constitutes an example of the way in which Krio, has been, or still is,
capable of expanding its vocabulary with additional senses. This appears to take place through
recycling of established lexemes in the language (Nordlander, 2007: 272). This process may be
claimed to run along two, not mutually exclusive, paths: (a) substrate cultural model influence and (b)
metonymic drift. In the case of bɛlɛ the semantic starting point is, quite naturally, its English
language origin, belly.
In English belly occurs in two semantic fields, (1) INSIDE OF BODY: stomach, intestines, eating:
bellyache ‘abdominal pain’ or bellyful ‘very (too) much of something’, and (2) OUTSIDE OF BODY, its
size and shape: beer belly ‘fat stomach acquired from too much beer’, belly wool ‘The wool from a
sheep’s belly’ (OED).
Krio bɛlɛ is heavily represented in these two semantic fields too, but, in contradistinction to English,
bɛlɛ is part of (at least) two other such fields as well, (3) PREGNANCY and its consequences: bɛlɛ
fayn ‘having a healthy pregnancy’, bɛlɛ bles ‘person is blessed with good children’, and (4)
EMOTIONS, particularily anger, fear and apprehension: bɛlɛ jomp ‘person’s belly muscels contract in
fear’ and bɛlɛ rip ‘person becomes greatly alarmed’ (Fyle & Jones, 1980).
Our paper will discuss the above-mentioned bi-pathed way along which Krio has aquired these
additional senses of bɛlɛ, and we will argue that the use of bɛlɛ in the semantic field of PREGNANCY
to a great extent is a result of metonymic drift, whereas for EMOTIONS, substrate cultural model
influence seems to be more prominent.
References
Fyle, C. N. & Jones, E. D. (1980) A Krio-English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nordlander, Johan. (2007) ‘The Metonymic Element in Krio Conceptualization: The cases of BIF and
BUSH’. In Kosecki, Krzysztof (2007) Perspectives on Metonymy. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp.
271–287.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Net-version. http://dictionary.oed.com
Number Variation in Jamaican Patwa
Peter L Patrick
University of Essex, UK
This paper analyzes variation in the marking of number on plural nouns in mesolectal Jamaican Patwa
(JP) – one of only three variable features for which comparable quantitative data exist from Creole and
African American English speech communities (Rickford 2006). Earlier theoretical claims for
22
grammatical and functional principles to constrain variation in JP, and English-related Creoles
generally, are tested and found wanting (Bickerton 1975, Dijkhoff 1983, Mufwene 1986). Many
previous empirical studies lacked a valid, sufficiently nuanced taxonomy of surface forms which can
reliably map onto the level of reference, and permit reorganization at a more abstract level capable of
allowing generalizations.
Quantitative analysis considers the choice between plural –z and zero in regular nouns in light of the
major claimed linguistic constraints – syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and phonological. Results are
compared with other contemporary English-lexicon Creoles, African American Vernacular English
(AAVE, eg Rowe 2005), and African American Diaspora varieties (eg Singler 2007). Two corpora are
first analysed separately, then combined to form the largest database yet studied for number-marking
in any single Creole, African American Diaspora, or African American Vernacular English-speaking
community. Results show that number-marking with –z/zero variation is a robust part of JP grammar,
operating according to a system that is markedly different from the redundant agreement of English,
yet consistent across a wide spectrum of speakers. Moreover, the data contradict the various ‘Creole
patterns’ put forth in the literature, and used as a basis for historical conclusions concerning AAVE and
Creole genesis: number marking is clearly not a functional response by speakers to ease listeners’
comprehension task (cf. James 2001), and the ‘local disambiguation’ pattern which has been argued
to be “quintessentially creole” (e.g. Poplack, Tagliamonte, & Eze 2000) does not hold of any of the
varieties compared here. Finally, this paper characterizes contrasts in levels of redundant marking
across the JP Creole continuum, arguing that the same constraints hold for all speakers and
illustrating the rise of systematic redundant marking across the speech community, thus shedding light
on the nature of agreement in Atlantic Creole continua.
References
Bickerton, Derek. 1975. Dynamics of a Creole system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dijkhoff, Marta. 1983. The process of pluralization in Papiamentu. In L. Carrington et al., eds., Studies
in Caribbean Language. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Society for Caribbean Linguistics, 217 229.
James, Winford. 2001. The noun phrase in Tobagonian. Society for Caribbean Linguistics Occasional
Paper no. 28. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies.
Mufwene, Salikoko. 1986. Number delimitation in Gullah. American Speech 61(1): 33 60.
Poplack, Shana, Sali Tagliamonte, & Ejike Eze. 2000. Reconstructing the source of early African
American English plural marking: A comparative study of English and Creole. In S Poplack, ed., The
English history of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell, 73-105.
Rickford, John R. 2006. Down for the count? The Creole Origins hypothesis of AAVE at the hands of
the Ottawa Circle, and their supporters. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 21(1): 97-155.
Rowe, Ryan. 2005. The development of African American English in the oldest Black town in America:
Plural –s absence in Princeville, North Carolina. MA thesis, North Carolina State University.
Singler, John V. 2007. Examining a pidgin and one of its substrate languages: Plural marking in
Vernacular Liberian English and Bassa. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Pidgin and
Creole Linguistics, Amsterdam, June 2007.
Creolization: Typology, feature pools, and second language acquisition
Ingo Plag
Universität Siegen, Germany
In recent years we have seen a growing popularity of approaches to creolization (and language
creation in general) that are based on the idea of selection from a so-called ‘feature pool’ (e.g.
Mufwene 2001, Aboh & Ansaldo 2006). Among other things, it has been claimed that the emergence
of the new grammar is driven by the syntax-discourse prominence, markedness and frequency of
available features, with typological similarity or dissimilarity of the languages involved playing a crucial
role in the competition and selection process.
In this paper I will take a closer look at the predictions of a feature-based approach to creolization and
test whether these predictions are borne out by the facts. I will show that this approach, while perhaps
helping to gain insights at the population level, crucially neglects processes at the speaker level,
processes of second language acquisition in particular. Based on the assumption that one can only
create and select what is learnable, the paper will demonstrate that feature pool-based approaches
necessarily fail to explain certain facts that cross-linguistically seem to hold in creole languages,
irrespective of the typologies of the languages involved. I will also provide cases in which typology
23
does play a role, but this role is crucially constrained by processing restrictions at the level of the
individual speaker
Aspectual closure: between pragmatic and prosodic phenomena
Paula Prescod
Université Paris III, France
English-based creoles and pidgins incorporate lexical items that stem from varieties of British English,
albeit in new environments. This paper focuses on the incorporation of the English participle done in
creole and pidgins. Its status as a bona fide aspect marker is not fully established in all the varieties.
From a pragmatic point of view, done is accounted for as a completive (Winford 1993: 48) or
terminative aspect marker (Mufwene 1984: 209), labels that entail past time reference and emphasize
only one part of a dynamic event or process, i.e. its termination (Comrie 1976: 12).
Accounting for done solely in terms of closure prevents us from grasping the pragmatic message
intended with state verbs and adjectival predicates. The outcome implied in such cases relates to the
present and any completed action that brings about a present result need not conceptually be viewed
as a bonded whole. Thus, done indicates “a complete change of state, specifically inception rather
than cessation” (Chung & Timberlake 1985: 218). Furthermore, done may signal, ingression, i.e. entry
into a state as in (1).
(1)
Aaz Sonnie si di bakl Sonnie duhn druhnk (Vincentian creole)
‘As soon as Sonnie sees the bottle he gets drunk.’
With non-statives, done is generally articulated with stress and high pitch (Winford 1993: 53), giving
currency to Rickford’s (1987: 125) claim that done denotes emphatic perfect aspect. This label does
account for the prosodic nature of done, but it also suggests that done utterances can adequately be
glossed as English present perfect, which is not the case in utterances like (1). Moreover, there are
notable differences between the prosodic phenomena that accompany creole done utterances and
English present perfect utterances. Our survey also reveals that the emphatic-perfect label is partially
borne out in done+non-stative associations, given that there are different prosodic manifestations
contingent on the predicate types combined with done. Hence, we demonstrate that done has not
been fully grammaticalized as a marker of completive aspect on a par with the fully grammaticalized
English present perfect.
References
Chung, Sandra & Timberlake, Alan. 1987. “Tense, aspect and mood.” In Shopen, Timothy (ed.). 202258.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect: an introduction of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Mufwene, Salikoko. 1984. “Observations on time reference in Jamaican and Guyanese creoles.”
English World-Wide 4: 2. 199-229.
Rickford, John. 1987. Dimensions of a Creole continuum: history, texts, and linguistic analysis of
Guyanese creole. Stanford: University Press.
Winford, Donald. 1993. Predication in Caribbean English Creoles. CLL 10. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
Benjamins.
Berbice Demographics and the development of Creole languages in the Caribbean
Ian E. Robertson
University of the West Indies, Jamaica
Demographic factors have always been central to studies of the development of Creole languages of
the Caribbean. It has been consistently argued hat a small powerful majority had social and political
control over a much larger but linguistically and ethnically heterogenous group. This heterogeneity has
been assumed to be the major reason for the need for new communication systems since the
subjected group did not share a common linguistic medium. In more recent times, some arguments
have been presented for a more dominant role of one or other language or language cluster in the
development of these languages. Evidence will be presented in this paper to challenge the
24
assumption on the basis of a combination of linguistic and demographic evidence gleaned from the
records of plantations in eighteenth century Berbice. The records suggest that the situation could not
have been as simple and clear cut as has been assumed so far. This paper will present the situation
as it existed in Berbice at a crucial point in the development of the colony and will argue for more indepth investigation of the cases studied so far.
Éléments de reconstruction pour l'origine des créoles portugais d'Afrique
Jean-Louis Rougé & Emmanuel Schang
Université d'Orléans, France
Il est généralement accepté que les créoles portugais du Golfe de Guinée ont pour origine un même
système antérieur (proto-créole), que la comparaison du forro et de l’angolar permet de reconstruire
partiellement.
D’un autre côté, l’hypothèse la plus plausible (Teixeira da Mota 1954, Rougé 1986, 1984, 2000)
concernant l’origine des créoles de haute Guinée (Guinée-Bissau et Casamance, Cap-Vert), suppose
que ces langues se sont développées à partir de variétés antérieures communes (pidgin ou autre) que
la comparaison permet également de reconstruire. A ce jour la comparaison de l’ensemble des
créoles portugais d’Afrique n’a été menée systématiquement que pour le lexique (Rougé, 2004). Cette
communication montrera que l’on peut reconstruire aussi des morceaux d’un système commun à
partir de la comparaison des systèmes grammaticaux de l’ensemble des créoles portugais d’Afrique
(CPA). Nous nous intéresserons ici en particulier, aux systèmes verbaux des CPA. Nous soutenons
que le « cœur » d’un système commun (Rougé 2000) peut être reconstruit et que l’extension du
système central est le résultat de différents processus. Ainsi, les systèmes verbaux des PCA
s’articulent tous autour d’une opposition accompli (non-marqué)/inaccompli (marqué), l’inaccompli à
son tour repose sur une opposition progressif//habituel les marques aspectuelles présentant des
similitudes significatives : ta ou ka |v s| sata ou saka. Notre analyse confirme les propositions de
e
Becker et Veenstra (2003). Cette démarche ne conduit pas à reconstruire le portugais du 17 siècle ou
une langue africaine, mais un proto-créole en rapport avec la notion de Basic variety ( Klein & Perdue
1997).
Références
Becker, A. & Veenstra, T. (2003) « Creole Prototypes as Basic Varieties and Inflectional Morphology »
in: Dimroth, C. & Starren, M. (eds.) Information structure and the dynamics of language acquisition.
John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Klein, W. & C. Perdue 1997. « The basic variety ». In Second Language Research 13/4.
Rougé, J-L. (2000) « D'où viennent les verbes ».
Rougé, J.L. & Schang, E. (2001) “Eléments de comparaison de la lunga ngola et de la lungwa
santomé : sur la piste d’un proto-créole » Communication au colloque de l’ACBLPE Coimbra 2001 in
Rougé J.L. Etudes des créoles portugais d’Afrique : genèse, structures, contacts, représentation,
diffusion. Dossier d’habilitation à la direction des recherches. Université d’Orléans (2005)
A contrastive approach to tense and aspect in Cameroon Pidgin English
Anne Schröder
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
The study of tense and aspect constitutes a central area of research into Pidgins and Creoles. The
tense and aspect system of Cameroon Pidgin English (CamP) as such, however, has received
comparatively little attention. What we find are descriptions of the tense and aspect formations of
CamP in a number of publications describing the structure of this language in general, some of which
are teaching manuals e.g. for Peace Corps volunteers (e.g. Bellama et al. 1985). Especially these
teaching manuals, but also some of the other publications (e.g. Ayafor 2000), frequently compare
CamP to its superstrate English. One could argue that these descriptions of the CamP tense and
aspect system could be referred to as ‘contrastive’ as CamP structures are in fact compared to English
ones. However, as König and Gast (2007:5) point out: “The problem of establishing comparability and
of finding the ‘third of comparison’ (tertium comparationis) is a major issue in any kind of comparative
work.” Hence, instead of simply juxtaposing structures of the two languages in question and of
providing (more or less accurate) translations, a truly contrastive approach would need a “solid
descriptive foundation” (ibid.: 2).
25
Therefore the present paper compares primary data from CamP and its lexifier language English,
which were elicited with the help of a language-independent method, i.e. Dahl’s TMA questionnaire
(Dahl 1985). The comparison of these data will allow for a more accurate description of the
relationship between CamP and its superstrate English and hence of the tense and aspect system of
CamP.
References
Ayafor, Miriam (2000). ““Kamtok: The Ultimate Unifying Common National Language for Cameroon.”
The Carrier Pidgin 28: 4-6.
Bellama, David et al. (1983). An Introduction to Cameroonian Pidgin. Yaoundé: Peace Corps
Cameroon.
Dahl, Östen (1985). Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
König, Ekkehard and Volker Gast (2007). Understanding English-German Contrasts. Berlin: Schmidt.
The Umeå Krio Database, the Krio NetNotes Series and the Krio Publications Series
Neville Shrimpton, Sulayman Njie and Johan Nordlander
Umeå University, Sweden
In 2004 the Umeå Krio Database became available for general access. The database and a new Netbased publications series, the Krio NetNotes (2002-), were the culmination of work that had started in
1979, and that over the years has involved co-operation with researchers, writers, educationalists,
librarians and others in a number of countries, primarily Sweden, The Gambia and Sierra Leone.
Initially, a group of teachers and researchers in the English Department at Umeå University in the
north of Sweden became interested in Sierra Leone Krio, and contact was made with Professor Eldred
Jones, the co-author of the Krio-English Dictionary (1980). Professor Jones was at that time Principal
of Fourah Bay College in the capital, Freetown. Visits to Sierra Leone followed, and we began to
collect Krio materials, mostly in the form of plays by dramatists who were active in Freetown. With
various aims in mind, and to provide the authors with some financial and other recompense, we edited
some of the plays, and Umeå University published them as the Krio Publications Series (1982-).
The co-operation led to more activities, including jointly organized workshops in Freetown, and to
other valued contacts and lasting friendships. In particular, there have been a number of international
projects, funded by the Swedish development aid agencies, Sida and Sarec, and support for the
establishment of the database from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
The poster will attempt to provide workshop participants with a survey of the areas in which we have
been working, how the database came about, what it actually is and how it can be used. It will also
provide information about more technical aspects of the database, what problems there have been/are
and what solutions have been found/are being sought. Finally, it will introduce materials which are
included in the database, such as the Krio Publications Series and the outstanding translation into Krio
of the New Testament (1985), which the Sierra Leone Bible Society has generously allowed us to use.
The Standard Krio Orthography
Neville Shrimpton
Umeå University, Sweden
How Sierra Leone Krio has come to have a standard orthography is an exciting tale, populated by a
number of remarkable actors and set against a background of cultural and political change and
upheaval. Some people would claim that it still does not have a standard, and others would argue that
it should not have one.
My starting-point is 1939 and a man called Thomas Decker, a true champion of the Krio language, as
evidenced by his articles in the Sierra Leone Daily Guardian during that year. There he argued
fervently that Krio was a proper language, not a pidgin, and certainly not just bad English. He went
much further: he discussed its dialects and debated with others about how it should be spelt. He was a
real creolist at a time when such people were very thin on the ground.
Essentially, only three types of orthography for the language have ever been debated: a nonphonemic orthography, largely based on the spelling of English etynyms of Krio words, a phonemic
orthography based on the Roman alphabet with no diacritics or ‘phonetic’ letters, and a phonemic
orthography with some extra letters. Decker used a phonemic orthography for his famous translations
26
into Krio of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and As You Like It in the 1960s. By then a different
phonemic orthography was also being used by Eldred Jones. This, unlike Decker’s (popular)
orthography, contained some extra ‘phonetic’ letters and was basically the one that would later be
adopted, with amendments, as the standard. Decker died in 1978, and in 1980 Eldred Jones and
Clifford Fyle published their Krio-English Dictionary. The Dictionary, and a number of subsequent
orthography and standardization workshops, were to settle the question once and for all.
Real implementation of the standard orthography came with the inclusion of Krio in the secondary
school curriculum (as an elective only) in 1993. This implementation involved other actors and was
aided by other events, including the translation of the New Testament into Krio.
This paper will summarize and exemplify significant aspects of this fascinating story.
Using Syntax to Reveal Camouflaged Diachrony in a Restructured Grammar
Peter Slomanson
City University of New York, USA
Accounts of contact language development which depend on synchronic linear parallels between the
languages in contact may mask significant diachronic facts. The grammar of Sri Lankan Malay (SLM)
has been heavily influenced by other Sri Lankan languages, which mark progressive aspect postverbally with a grammaticalized suffix with the lexical meaning 'take'. This is paralleled in SLM,
however there are reasons to question the conclusion that the element in SLM is a straightforward
calque.
Ambe, the marker of progressive aspect in SLM, violates a syntactic generalization in that language
with no parallel in Muslim Tamil or Sinhala. An aspectual affix normally follows a lexical verb only if
the verb is finite, and precedes non-finite lexical verbs. The syntactic facts in question are an
independent development in SLM grammar, not shared by the Malay lexifier, Muslim Tamil, or Sinhala.
Ambe frequently co-occurs with an auxiliary verb and SLM periphrastic constructions are biclausal,
with the lexical verb in the non-matrix clause (Slomanson 2008). SLM complementizers are now
primarily left-branching.
Rikas ruma-pəɖə e-rikat
ambe (jo) a-ɖuɖuk.
Rikas house-PLU ASP-build PROG (FOC) TNS-AUX
"Rikas has been building houses."
Though an apparent calque of an aspectual suffix in Muslim Tamil or in Sinhala, ambe is most
plausibly analyzed as an adaptation of a right-branching Malay aspectual complementizer.
The invariable post-verbal position of ambe in non-finite clauses constitutes syntactic evidence that
ambe did not develop from Malay ambil 'take' as a straightforward calque, as claimed in Smith &
Paauw (2006). It is derived from the left-branching aspectual complementizer sambil ('while'), through
syntactic reorganization and s-aphaeresis. Left-branching sambil was still used in Sri Lanka in the
early twentieth century, but it has been replaced by ambe.
References
Slomanson, P. 2008. The Perfect Construction and Complexity Drift in Sri Lankan Malay. Lingua,
118.10.
Smith, I. & S. Paauw. 2006. Sri Lanka Malay: creole or convert? In Deumert, A. & S. Durrleman (eds).
Structure and Variation in Contact Languages, 159-181. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Le rouge et le noir: What are the consequences of linguistic confrontation between Red and
Black, and why?
Norval Smith
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
There are a number of known situations involving the close association of Red (Amerindian) and Black
(Maroon/Free African) populations in the New World. In four cases the linguistic end-result of this
association is known. In three of the four cases both groups (or the combined groups in one case)
ended up speaking an Amerindian language, while in the fourth case the two groups retained separate
(first) languages.
27
The four cases that will be considered are (from north to south): the Black and Red Seminole of
Florida, the Sambo Miskitu and Tawira Miskitu of Nicaragua/Honduras, the Black and Red (or Yellow)
Caribs of St. Vincent, and the Muraato (Western) Caribs of Surinam (now a mixed population).
Why is this of interest? Many ideas about creolization proceed from the assumption that the
differences between creoles and their (assumed) European models derive from the lack of sufficient
access to European language models. I show elsewhere that in the case of Surinam, where we have
the best demographic evidence and historic knowledge to construct a timetable of events, the "lack of
access" argument cannot hold. The development of creoles, taking elements from both substrate and
superstrate sources, must instead be attributed to the rapid growth of community feeling. Communities
everywhere have linguistic markers - those typical of creole languages are driven by the special needs
of the slavery situation (cf. Jourdan to appear). I have argued elsewhere for rapid creolization to match
the rapid growth of community feeling I assume.
What happens in the early linguistic confrontations involving Red and Black groups can provide an
additional window on the creolization process - why did the Black group only speak a creole language
in one case out of four?
References
Jourdain, C. (to appear). The cultural in PC genesis. In: J. Singler and S. Kouwenberg (eds.), The
handbook of pidgin and creole languages. Oxford: Blackwell.
Induction of French Structures into Creole Grammar in the French Overseas
Pascal Vaillant
Université des Antilles et de la Guyane
French-based Creole languages have developed in regions where a colonial society once emerged on
an originally French settlement. In the Atlantic area, this includes Louisiana, Haiti, Lesser Antilles
islands like Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique and Saint-Lucia, and finally part of the northern coast
of South America (in French Guiana, and marginally in the Brazilian state of Amapa). Among those
regions, three of them have kept a strong tie to the French "motherland'': Guadeloupe, Martinique and
French Guiana, up to the present, are political and administrative parts of France; the language of their
school system and mass media is French, except in some specific niches.
Our interest bears on the influence of French on the French-based Creole languages spoken in those
French overseas regions. Recent corpora (transcripts of radio broadcasts) show that even within
Creole discourse, French and Creole are strongly intermingled. In this situation, a range of language
contact phenomena may be observed, among which code switching and code mixing. But here we
focus on internal phenomena within the systems of the Creole languages themselves. We show that a
number of frequent structures in contemporary Creole sentences show a strong parallelism with
French language equivalents, when in contrast they differ from the "classical'' description given by
linguists of the typical Creole. An example is the use of calques of some French pronominal verbs --e.g. "man ka di ko mwen'' (litt. "I am telling myself", cmp. French "je me dis"), cmp. "man ka sonjé'' ("I
am thinking").
We question the influence of French on the Creoles of those French overseas territories by contrasting
it with contemporary occurrences of Haiti French Creole. Our observations lead us to think that French
structures enter by ``induction'' in overseas French Creoles: within a natural variation in Creole
grammars, deeply rooted in history, structures closest to the French patterns are now favoured among
competing structures. A close look at the corpora show that this happens all the more so in the vicinity
of loan French phrases.
(Dis)Agreement in the Eastern Caribbean: Evidence from Bequia
James A. Walker
York University, Canada
Subject-verb agreement is generally said to be absent from creolized varieties of English (e.g. Holm
1988), yet spontaneous data from creole-speaking communities reveals variation in verbal s-marking
(here defined as the verbal suffix –s or inflected forms of irregular verbs):
(1)
a.
No neighbour hassleØ you, no neighbour quarrels.
(M.2.269)
28
b.
Today, vehicles is riding on them.
(P.l.352)
Is such variation the (hypercorrect?) intrusion into a creole grammar of a more English-like system? Or
does such variation represent a single, albeit highly variable linguistic system? In this paper, I examine
the linguistic factors conditioning the use of s-marking in the English spoken on Bequia (St Vincent
and the Grenadines). The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with 18 speakers from three
villages on Bequia, each characterized by different ethnic and social characteristics: Hamilton, Mt
Pleasant and Paget Farm.
Preliminary results show quite different overall rates of s-marking between villages, with the lowest
rates found in Hamilton and the highest rates in Mt Pleasant. For Mt Pleasant and Paget Farm, the
rd
paramount constraint conditioning the variation is grammatical person (with most s-marking in 3 sg.,
rd
rd
less in 3 pl. and least in non-3 ), though there are secondary effects of subject type, habitual aspect
(Mt Pleasant) and phonological context (Paget Farm). Hamilton shows no significant conditioning by
any linguistic factors, suggesting that agreement is largely absent in this community.
These results are consistent with our ongoing work on other variables, such as zero copula (Meyerhoff
& Walker 2007; Walker & Meyerhoff 2006), negation (Walker & Sidnell, in press), past-marking
(Daleszynska 2008) and existentials (Meyerhoff & Walker 2008). Hamilton, an African-descent
community, features the most creole-like system, Mt Pleasant, the British-descent community, has
characteristics of nonstandard English, and Paget Farm is more mixed. However, a closer examination
of differences between regular and irregular (be, do, have) verbs, and between specific lexical types
within each category, suggests that much of the ‘grammar’ of agreement may better be characterized
as lexical.
The Impact of a Writing System on the Evolution of a Language
Brigitte Weber
Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Pidgin and Creole languages originate among people who do not share a mother tongue. Many of
them have never been written down and studied. They are comparatively young languages and
several of their first users were probably illiterate.
Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) is the variety of West African Pidgin English (WAPE) spoken in
Cameroon. The rich and diverse sources of the language reflect the historical conditions of this
multiethnic and multilingual country. German colonial influence lasted from 1884 to 1916 during which
time this pidginized language was used as a lingua franca. During this time CPE began to be written
down by the Germans. Certain German characteristics can be found in pronunciation, which is
reflected in orthography.
The most essential key document during the Germans’ presence in Cameroon is Gunther von
Hagen’s Kurzes Handbuch für Neger=Englisch an der Westküste Afrikas unter besonderer
Berücksichtigung von Kamerun (Berlin 1908). Hagen’s way of dealing with pronunciation is presented
according to the phonetic system employed in the ‘Method of Toussaint – Langenscheidt’ (1856). In
th
the middle of the 19 century the German Gustav Langenscheidt had developed a method of selfstudy learning materials, first for French and English, later for other European languages. With his
methodology of language learning the main focus had shifted from grammar to pronunciation and
communication skills. He created the first easy-to-use phonetics system as part of the ‘ToussaintLangenscheidt method’. It was, however, much influenced by the German spelling system and
orthography.
Written examples of Cameroon Pidgin English show a marked influence of German which has
generally been neglected so far with most researchers.