Journal
of Portuguese
Linguistics
Volume 3 No. 2 2004
Abstracts
Saramaccan,
an Atlantic creole whose lexifier languages are Portuguese and English, has a
“split” prosodic system wherein the majority of its words are marked for
pitch accent but an important minority are marked for tone. Split prosody is
typologically unusual and runs counter to McWhorter’s (2001a) idea that creole
languages should have “simpler” grammars than non-creole languages. However,
this complication of Saramaccan grammar does appear to be broadly consistent
with the more general claim of McWhorter (1998) that creoles form an
identifiable class of languages on typological, in addition to sociohistorical,
grounds.
Saramaccan
is an Atlantic English creole with substratal tonal features, including high
tone spread. While high tone spread
is generally leftward, an analysis of rightward spread accounts for the data in
serial verb constructions where there are high tones that cannot be explained by
leftward spread. However, there are
other serial verb constructions with high tones that can be explained by
leftward spread. There are two sets
of high tone spread rules, then, but rightward spread is basically limited to
constructions that are unequivocally of substrate origin, namely serial verb
constructions. Significantly, while
the origin of leftward spread is unknown, the primary substrate language Fongbe
has rightward high tone spread, and is the apparent source of Saramaccan serial
verb constructions. This uniquely
substrate construction, then, may have transferred with its own rightward tone
spread rules, which adapted to leftward tone spread rules resulting in rightward
tone spread rules in Saramaccan that are more complex than the source.
I propose that tone in Papiamentu is a marker of the morphosyntactic
category of a given form. Its primary function, therefore, is grammatical. This
account of Papiamentu tone differs from previously proposed accounts, which
treat tone in Papiamentu as a lexical property (Römer, 1991; Rivera-Castillo,
1998) or as a purely phonological property (Devonish & Murray, 1995).
This paper investigates the distribution and the properties of the two allomorphs that stand for the verb ‘to go’ in Santome. From the analysis of a range of grammatical properties, such as Case-marking, extraposition, pseudoreflexivisation and serialisation, I conclude that directed motion verbs are unspecified in the lexicon with respect to transitivity. Furthermore, the data show that there is a default form for ‘to go’, which I assume to be merged into the derivation. The non-default form can only be derived post-syntactically if special requirements are met.
This paper explores the syntax of copular predication within and across the varieties of Cape Verdean Creole bringing new insights about the morpho-syntactic properties of the copula with respect to functional and lexical categories. The behavior of the copula will be shown to reflect both superstratal, substratal and universal influences present in other languages. Furthermore, the study of copular predicates in which the copula is absent will reveal the specific underlying conditions in which such type of predicates occurs. A cursory typological study of semi-creoles such as AAVE and other non-creole languages will show that the same underlying conditions are present in a number of other world languages. Finally, a theoretical analysis will account for two types of copular predicates in Cape Verdean Creole: the first part highlights the distributional properties of the Cape Verdean copula within and across varieties. The second part illustrates copulaless predicates and the conditions under which they occur.
This article
contains what is possibly the most accurate wordlist of Portuguese-derived items
in Saramaccan (a creole language spoken in the interior of Suriname) produced so
far, and attempts to establish the proportions of Portuguese- versus
English-derived words in this language. We believe that the results are very
striking when the lexical category of the items concerned is taken into account.
These observations are then analysed in the light of a possible
scenario of the formation of Saramaccan involving the partial
relexification of an earlier form of Sranan (the English-lexifier creole of the
coast of Suriname) with Portuguese and/or a Portuguese-based Creole.
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