Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages: Papers from the University of Chicago Conference on Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages

345 Pages·1993·32.444 MB·

by  Francis Byrne, Donald Winford

FOCUS AND GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
IN CREOLE LANGUAGES
CREOLE LANGUAGE LIBRARY (CLL)
A companion series to the
"JOURNAL OF PIDGIN & CREOLE LANGUAGES"
Editors:
Pieter Muysken (Amsterdam)
John Victor Singler (New York)
Editorial Advisory Board:
Mervyn Alleyne (Kingston, Jamaica) George Huttar (Dallas)
Norbert Boretzky (Bochum) Salikoko Mufwene (Chicago)
Lawrence Carrington (Trinidad) Peter Mühlhäusler (Adelelaide)
Chris Corne (Auckland) Pieter Seuren (Nijmegen)
Glenn Gilbert (Carbondale, Illinois) Norval Smith (Amsterdam)
John Holm (New York)
Volumes in this series will present descriptive and theoretical studies
designed to add significantly to our insight in Pidgin and Creole languages.
Volume 12
Francis Byrne and Donald Winford (eds)
Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages
FOCUS AND
GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
IN CREOLE LANGUAGES
Edited by
FRANCIS BYRNE
DONALD WINFORD
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
Amsterdam/Philadelphia
1993
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Focus and grammatical relations in creole languages / edited by Francis Byrne, Donald
Winford.
p. cm. -- (Creole language library, ISSN 0920-9026; v. 12)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Creole dialects-Grammar. I. Byrne, Francis. II. Winford, Donald. III. Series.
PM7831.F63 1993
417'.22-dc20 93-11700
ISBN 90 272 5233 5 (Eur.) / 1-55619-166-9 (US) (Hb.; alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1993 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O. Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America • 821 Bethlehem Pike • Philadelphia, PA 19118 • USA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The road to this volume began when Alexander Caskey and Francis Byrne per­
ceived the need for a series of highly focussed conferences on selected topics deal­
ing with the syntax and semantics of creole languages. The feeling was that the field
of creolistics had become sufficiently developed so that a detailed examination of
the subareas and processes of these languages was warranted within the larger
venue of linguistics in general. Thus, the Conference on Focus and Grammatical
Relations in Creole Languages took place at The University of Chicago on 10-12
May 1990. This volume reflects that conference. We should add that although
Alexander Caskey is not a formal editor of the volume, he has made significant con­
tributions into its contents and realization.
In relation to the conference, we would first like to thank the Division of Hu­
manities and the Departments of Linguistics and Romance Languages and Litera­
tures of The University of Chicago for financial and logistical assistance. The ma­
jor funding for both the conference and the preparation of the manuscripts for this
volume originated from National Science Foundation Grant No. BNS-8920087 for
which grateful acknowledgement is hereby made.
Among the individuals who played key roles in the success of the conference
were Guillermo Bartelt, Guy Carden, Connie Cheung, Viviane Deprez, J.L. Dillard,
Marta Dijkhoff, Jan Terje Faarlund, John Goldsmith, Morris Goodman, Ian Han­
cock, Brian Joseph, Richard Larson, John Lipski, Diane Massam, James McCawley,
Karl-Erik McCullough, Jerry Morgan, Rebecca Posner, Jerrold Sadock, Eric Schil­
ler, Michael Silverstein, William Stewart and Stuart M. Tave.
At John Benjamins Publishing Company, we owe a debt of gratitute to John
and Claire Benjamins, Yola de Lusenet, and Kees Vaes for general publication sup­
port and in working with us to produce a work of quality. We likewise thank Pieter
Muysken, co-editor of the Creole Language Library, for his dedicated work in
overseeing the entire project and in suggesting improvements to the volume.
Those who, in various direct or indirect capacities, helped with the preparation
of the volume's manuscripts, and thus the publication of this book, are Dennis
Travis and Julia Coll. Special mention must also be given to Peter Kahrel of the In­
stitute for General Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam, Brian Joseph, and
the Department of Linguistics of The Ohio State University for facilities and techni­
cal and consultative support. Such assistance has been greatly appreciated and the
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
realization of this book would have been much more difficult without their gener­
ous help.
Finally, we would like to thank the contributors whose papers are found here.
When all is said and done, they are the ones whose efforts and abilities are solely re­
sponsible for this volume's existence.
Francis Byrne
Donald Winford
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v
CONTENTS vii
Introduction: Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages
Francis Byrne, Alexander F. Caskey
and Donald Winford ix
SECTION ONE: VERB FOCUS, PREDICATE CLEFTING
AND PREDICATE DOUBLING
Verb Focus in the Typology of Kwa/Kru and Haitian
Victor Manfredi 3
The Question of Predicate Clefting in the Indian
Ocean Creoles
Pieter A.M. Seuren 53
Two Types of Predicate Doubling Adverbs in Haitian Creole
Claire Lefebvre and Elizabeth Ritter 65
SECTION TWO: FOCUS AND ANTI-FOCUS
Scope of Negation and Focus in Gullah
Salikoko S. Mufwene 95
Focus in Tok Pisin
Gillian Sankoff 117
What is it that you said? A Study of Obligatory Focalization
in Two Creoles and Beyond
Alain Kihm 141
Anti-Focus in Yor-bß: Some Implications for Creoles
Olásopé O. Oyèlâràn 163
viii CONTENTS
SECTION THREE: FOCUS AND PRONOMINALS
Subject Focus and Pronouns
Derek Bickerton 189
Focus, Emphasis and Pronominale in Saramaccan
Francis Byrne and Alexander F. Caskey 213
SECTION FOUR: DISCOURSE PATTERNING
Focus, Topic Particles and Discourse Markers in the
Belizean Creole Continuum
Genevieve Escure 233
Foregrounding and Backgrounding in Haitian Creole Discourse
Arthur K. Spears 249
SECTION FIVE: GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
Expletives in Double-Object Constructions in Haitian Creole
John S. Lumsden 269
Reflexives of Ibero-Romance Reflexive Clitic + Verb Combinations
in Papiamentu: Thematic Grids and Grammatical Relations
Pieter Muysken 285
Author Index 303
Language Index 307
Subject Index 311
INTRODUCTION: FOCUS AND GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
IN CREOLE LANGUAGES
Francis Byrne, Alexander F. Caskey
and Donald Winford
1.0. Introduction
The seminal works of Ross (1967), Schachter (1973) and Chomsky (1977), as
well as many subsequent important publications,1 were significant in identifying,
classifying and explicating the broad range of mechanisms and processes that hu­
man language utilizes in syntactically emphasizing sentence-level constituents. In
addition to the better-known syntactic structures such as right and left dislocation,
topicalization, and clefts and pseudoclefts, there are also many other phenomena
such as intonation, stress, and reduplication, among others, which independently, or
in concert with the above syntactic mechanisms, serve to highlight sentence-level
constituents.
This volume has as its topic, then, the types of constructions and devices which
creole languages utilize to achieve constituent emphasis. While keeping in mind
that focus, a pertinent term in the title of this chapter and volume, represents a speci­
fic syntactic process and contitutes one means to achieve such emphasis, we addi­
tionally use the term here in a broad and general sense to encompass the entire
range of phenomena found in creole languages. Among these interests, besides the
repertoire of devices mentioned above and their viability and features in creole
grammars, are subsidiary but critical phenomena commonly discussed in the theore­
tical and general linguistic literature. These include the correlation between mor­
phological and syntactic properties of wh-like forms in focus structures, the pre-
clausal nature of these constructions, the status of empty or pronominally-filled
slots in clauses-proper, pragmatic and discourse considerations, questions of logical
form, scope, movement (or its absence), emphasis and emphatic devices in a general
and specific sense, and focus and/or emphatic effects on other domains of grammar.
In addition to the above issues, also pertinent are a number of less well known
and often creole-specific phenomena, several of which have only fairly recently
been adumbrated in these languages. These include verb emphasis (including what
scholars label in this volume as predicate clefting, verb focus and predicate doubl-
X BYRNE, CASKEY, WINFORD
ing) and focus marking (the marking of focused constituents by copular-like ele­
ments, pronominals, and/or deictic determiners and other specifiers). Additionally
of interest to creole studies are substrate/superstrate focus patterning and idiosyn­
cratic peculiarities of different creoles.
This volume will concentrate on the above and many other concerns and there­
by elucidate, without any one theoretical viewpoint taking precedence, a number of
the pertinent questions associated with focus in creole languages. In this way, the
volume represents some of the latest thinking in the field from multiple linguistic
perspectives and should thereby be of interest not only to creolists and linguists of
whatever pursuasion, but also to general linguistic theory.
2.0 Focus and Grammatical Relations
Among creole languages, there are on the whole fewer formal devices to syn­
tactically emphasize constituents than in older, longstanding languages with more
diachronic depth.2 The most common and basic means of syntactically achieving
such emphasis, generally, is the formal focus process itself as exemplified in (lb).
la) mi bói di ganía Saramaccan (Byrne 1987)
I cook the chicken
'I cooked the chicken.'
b) [dí ganía [ mi bói ec]]
i s i
the chicken I cook
'I cooked THE CHICKEN.'
In its basic form, the above structure is characterized by the focused constituent ap­
pearing in preclausal position, either through movement (Saramaccan: Byrne 1987)
or base-generation (Tok Pisin: Sankoff 1993, Woolford 1977), and is coindexed
with an empty category (ec) in a clause proper. There is also no comma intonation
as is found with topicalization.
Despite the apparently straightforward processes and the fewer mechanisms
available to many creoles to achieve focus-like effects,3 constituent focus in these
languages nevertheless is a far more variable and complex phenomenon than previ­
ously thought primarily because of co-occuring morphology. A somewhat common
hypothesis in the 1970s and '80s was that creole preclausal focus consists of cleft­
like structures with a It is X that/wh S-type schema, with the focused items being
base-generated in S" or its configurational counterpart.4 Analyses of this kind gave
attention to the common presence in some creoles of certain forms (quite often ho-
mophonous with copulas) which appear with many constituent-types upon clause-
initial focus (neutrally labeled here as FMS). Consider, for example, the data from
Krio, Caribbean English Creole (CEC) and Seselwa.
2a) snek kil am Krio (Alleyne 1980)
snake kill him
'The smake killed him.'