Journal of Portuguese
Linguistics
Volume 8, No. 2, 2009
Accounting for commonalities among the Portugueselexified creoles of Asia
Guest-edited by
Abstracts
This article identifies five Atlantic features in Asian varieties of Creole Portuguese. These reflect common substrate influence from NigerCongo languages converging with Portuguese forms. This study supports the hypothesis of Dalgado (1917: 41) that the frequent contact between speakers of the different varieties of Asian Creole Portuguese had led to a partial reciprocal diffusion of these creoles’ features, setting this scenario within the larger context of the hypothesis of Clements (2000) that there existed both a general pidgin (spoken in Africa and Asia) and distinctive regional pidgins more influenced by local substrate languages. After examining the possibility that the MalayoPortuguese feature of marking distributive plurality through noun reduplication may have spread to IndoPortuguese, this study claims that at least five features of Portuguesebased creoles in Asia had their origin in Africa: (1) the form vai ‘to go’; (2) completive kaba; (3) the coordinating conjunction ku; (4) the preposition na; (5) the negator nunca. This leads to the conclusion that what the Portuguese brought with them to Asia in the 16th century was a general Portuguese pidgin that had been developing in Africa during the second half of the 15th century. This pidgin must have been far more variable and much less developed (i.e. less influenced by substrate languages) than the modern creolesin all probability a prepidgin foreigner talk continuum.
The present study appeals to the notions of social organization and Portuguese presence to account for some of the key difference among the creoles spoken in Diu, Daman, and Korlai (India). The concepts of frequency and perceptual salience are tapped to account for some of the similarities among these creoles.
In the particular case of the
Portuguesebased Asian Creoles, the structural and lexical similarities found
in Creoles from Diu to Macao have for decades raised questions and diverse
interpretations of their genetic relationships. Dalgado’s notion of a
reciprocal partial transfusion between the Asian Creoles accounts, in our view,
for these striking similarities. In this paper, we will try to show how the
peculiar character assumed by the Portuguese presence in Asia – the Estado da
Índia – justifies this reciprocal partial transfusion, through an intense
circulation of people and goods. We will further argue that a sociohistorical
analysis of more localised regional networks within the area covered by the
Estado da Índia can contribute to a finer and more comprehensive analysis of
their linguistic (structural and lexical) relationships.
This paper surveys the
widespread presence of two types of serial verb – the direct causative and the
indirect causative – in Portuguese and Spanish lexicallybased creole
languages of Asia. The discussion addresses the structural nature of these
valency increasing constructions, considering the semantic relations involved in
their argument sharing, and contemplates the potential roles of substrate and
superstrate languages in their development. It is proposed that the geographic
distribution of the serial verbs is owed to a convergence of substrate and
superstrates. In the case of the Asian Portuguese lexicallybased creoles, the
convergence would have begun in India. Subsequently, as the Portuguese
progressively established their trade network further east, the serial
structures received substrate reinforcement in the different settings where
creolization and stabilization occurred. Further reinforcement would have
occurred by way of population movements between the communities over a longer
period.
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