The Structure of Creole Words: Segmental, Syllabic and Morphological Aspects

257 Pages·2006·6.465 MB·English

by  Parth Bhatt, Ingo Plag

Linguistische
Arbeiten 505
Herausgegeben von Peter Blumenthal, Gereon Müller,
Ingo Plag, Beatrice Primus, Klaus von Heusinger und Richard Wiese

The Structure of Creole Words
Segmental, Syllabic and Morphological Aspects
Edited by Parth Bhatt and Ingo Plag
Max Niemeyer Verlag
Tübingen 2006
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek
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ISBN 13 978-3-484-30505-2 ISSN 0344-6727
ISBN 10 3-484-30505-3
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Table of contents
Preface VII
Dedication VIII
Introduction IX
Section 1: Segmental aspects
Thomas Klein
Creole phonology typology: Phoneme inventory size, vowel quality distinctions
and stop consonant series 3
Jean-Louis Rouge and Emmanuel Schang
The origin of the liquid consonant in Saotomense Creole 23
Eric Russell- Webb
Toward a phonology of obstruent voicing in Negerhollands 39
Norval Smith and Marleen van de Vate
Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems 59
Section 2: Syllabic aspects
Parth Bhatt and Emmanuel Nikiema
Empty Positions in Haitian Creole Syllable Structure 85
Alain Kihm
The phonological origin of language: Creole languages as a testing ground 107
Ingo Plag and Mareile Schramm
Early Creole syllable structure: A cross-linguistic survey of the earliest
attested varieties of Saramaccan, Sranan, St. Kitts and Jamaican 131
Section 3: Morphological aspects
Marina Pucciarelli
Logophoricity in Nigerian Pidgin English: An empirical study of variable
third person singular subject marking 153
VI
Shobha Satyanath
English in the New World: Continuity and change, the case of personal pronouns in
Guyanese English 179
Tonjes Veenstra
Head ordering in synthetic compounding: Acquisition processes and Creole genesis 201
Jacques Arends, Josje Verhagen, Eva van Lier, Suzanne Dikker and Hugo Cardoso
On the presence versus absence of morphological marking
in four Romance-based Creoles 223
Preface
This volume contains a collection of 11 papers originally presented at the 'Second
International Workshop on the Phonology and Morphology of Creole Languages' held at
the University of Siegen in October 2003. Other papers from the workshop are being
published by the same editors in Stress, tone and intonation in Creoles and contact
languages, a special issue of Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung/Language
Typology and Universals.
All papers in this volume have been anonymously reviewed by co-contributors or by
outside reviewers. The editors are very grateful to the contributors and the outside
reviewers for offering generously their time and expertise. The quality of the papers has
benefited from the constructive peer criticism and the cross-fertilization of ideas.
We would also like to extend our deepest gratitude to the people who have helped in
various ways in the preparation of this volume: Mareile Schramm, who coordinated and
supervised the final production stages of the camera-ready copy, Linda Zirkel for being her
invaluable assistant, and Maria Braun, Christina Kellenter, Sabine Lappe, Taivi Rimberg
and Gisela Schwung for always being there when help was needed. Finally, we thank the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Universität Siegen and the Fachbereich Sprach-,
Literatur- und Medienwissenschaften for their financial support.
While preparing this book for publication, we learned of the untimely death of one of our
contributors, Jacques Arends. Jacques was one of the pioneers in the diachronic study of
Creole languages and his work on the Surinamese Creoles is well-known and has been very
influential in our field. It is with great sadness that we dedicate this volume to his memory.
Jacques was a great scholar, and a wonderful colleague and friend.
Toronto and Siegen, September 2005
to the memory of Jacques Arends
Introduction
In the past few years phonology and morphology have developed from rather marginal
fields within Creole studies to areas on which central debates about the nature and
emergence of Creole languages have focused (e.g. Plag 2003a, Plag 2003b, Siegel 2004a,
2004b, Braun 2005). This volume brings together articles from the Second International
Workshop on the Phonology and Morphology of Creole Languages held at the University
of Siegen in October 2003 that are focused on segmental, syllabic and morphological
aspects of Creole words, thus contributing to the ongoing debates about the role and nature
of phonology and morphology in the grammar and the development of these languages. The
papers cover a wide range of languages and linguistic phenomena and address empirical,
historical and theoretical issues.
Starting the section on segmental aspects, Thomas Klein presents a typological study of
the segmental inventories of twenty-three Creole languages. Comparing the data obtained
in his survey to the data in Maddieson (1984) drawn from 317 non-Creole languages, the
author studies Creoles found in four zones: Atlantic, the Indian Ocean/ Pacific, Africa and
Asia. It is shown that the overall phonemic inventory of the twenty-three Creoles varies in
size from 19 to 37 segments. The mean number of segments is 27 segments and the median
is 26 segments. These numbers are slightly below those reported by Maddieson (1984) who
found a mean of over 31 and a median between 27 and 28. Turning to vowel qualities, the
author compares the vowel inventory of the Creoles to those of the languages reported by
Maddieson. In his survey, Maddieson found a range of 3 to 15 vowel qualities, while Klein
found a range of 5 to 9 vowel qualities. 78% of the Creole languages in Klein's sample
have between five and seven distinctive vowel qualities, while Maddieson found that 64.6%
of the languages surveyed fell within this range. The author interprets these results as
indicating that Creole languages fall within the general size and distribution of the world's
languages. The results of the analysis for stop consonants once again show that Creole
languages resemble non Creole languages since 67.3% of the languages in Maddieson's
survey had one or two stop series and 78% of the Creole languages in the author's survey
had two stop series. The author concludes that Creole languages in fact have typical rather
than reduced segment inventories.
Jean-Louis Rouge and Emmanuel Schang examine the behaviour of the liquid Μ in
Saotomense, a Portuguese lexifier Creole spoken on the island of Sao Tome located in the
Gulf of Guinea. The authors observe that the liquid consonant DJ has a particularly high
frequency in the vocabulary of this language. They argue that [\/ in Saotomense can be
associated to three segments in the Portuguese etymon: the liquid Dl, the simple vibrant /r/
or the multiple vibrant /R/. Saotomense DJ is thus best understood as the result of the
reanalysis of a number of liquid-like segments Based on 1,767 words taken from Rouge's
(2004) dictionary of Saotomense, the authors found 868 occurrences of Dl with 660 of these
being related to words of Portuguese origin. The authors show that the frequency of
deletion of the three liquid segments DI, Irl and /R/ is roughly similar and is not related to
their contrastive status (18.9% for /r/ and Ml and 13.38% for HI). Furthermore, neither the
stress pattern of the word, nor the tonal pattern of the word is a reliable predictor of the