Creole Language Library
Norval Smith · Francis Byrne · Donald Winford · Jacques Arends
Latest release: July 26, 2017
Series
53
Books
About this ebook series
Two of the most prominent hypotheses about why the structures of the Creole languages of the Atlantic and the Pacific differ are the universalist and he substrate hypotheses. The universalist hypothesis claims, essentially, that the particular grammatical properties of Creole languages directly reflect universal aspects of the human language capacity, and thus Creole genesis involves, then, the stripping away of the accretions of language history. The substrate hypothesis claims, on the other hand, that creole genesis results from the confrontation of two systems, the native languages of the colonized groups, and the dominant colonial language, and that the native language leaves strong traces in the resulting Creole. The contributions of this ground breaking collection present new and historical research on the old debate of substrata versus universals in Creole languages.
Substrata versus Universals in Creole Genesis: Papers from the Amsterdam Creole Workshop, April 1985
Book 1 · Jan 1986 ·
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Two of the most prominent hypotheses about why the structures of the Creole languages of the Atlantic and the Pacific differ are the universalist and he substrate hypotheses. The universalist hypothesis claims, essentially, that the particular grammatical properties of Creole languages directly reflect universal aspects of the human language capacity, and thus Creole genesis involves, then, the stripping away of the accretions of language history. The substrate hypothesis claims, on the other hand, that creole genesis results from the confrontation of two systems, the native languages of the colonized groups, and the dominant colonial language, and that the native language leaves strong traces in the resulting Creole. The contributions of this ground breaking collection present new and historical research on the old debate of substrata versus universals in Creole languages.
The Syntax of Serial Verbs: An investigation into serialisation in Sranan and other languages
Book 2 · Jan 1987 ·
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This monograph is about the chains of verbs commonly found in Creole Languages, West African languages, in particular the Kwa sub-group of Niger-Congo, Chinese and certain other languages and have acquired the name of 'serial verbs' in the literature. As a case study, the serial constructions of Sranan, a creole language of Surinam with an English lexical base, are examined in detail.
Grammatical Relations in a Radical Creole: Verb Complementation in Saramaccan
Book 3 · Jan 1987 ·
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With English and Portuguese as parent languages; the significant lexical retention of African languages; and the relative isolation of its speakers, Saramaccan has always stood out among Creole languages. Yet despite its obvious interest Saramaccan received little in the way of scholarly study. This groundbraking monograph dispels the mystery surrounding Saramaccan and provides strong evidence for a new approach to Creole origins. The study is carried out within the government-binding framework. The author shows how Saramaccan comes close to demonstrating what constitues the irreducible minimum of building blocks with which a language can be constructed, and the types of structure which must develop under such conditions. In this work Frank Byrne combines the outcome of patient and persevering fieldwork with a firm grasp of current theoretical issues and provides us with the insights into the nature of universal grammar of which a Creole like Saramaccan is potentially capable.
The Speech of the Negros Congos in Panama
Book 4 · Jan 1989 ·
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The negros congos of Panama's Caribbean coast are a unique cultural manifestation of Afro-Hispanic contact. During Carnival season each year, this group reenacts dramatic events which affected black slaves in colonial Panama, performs dances and pantomimes, and enforces a set of ritual laws' and punishments'. A key component of congo games is a special dialect, the hablar en congos, which is employed by a subset of the congos in each settlement. The present study investigates the congo dialect from a linguistic point of view along two dimensions. The first involves deliberate phonetic, syntactic, and semantic distortion as part of the overall spirit of of burlesque and ridicule that surrounds Panamanian Carnival. The second is the retention of earlier, partially creolized Afro-Hispanic language forms which may still be extracted from contemporary congo speech. These Afro-Hispanic vestiges are of key importance to monogenetic theories of Afro-Romance creolization as Panamanian congo speech provides examples of unique creolized Spanish.
Sing Without Shame: Oral traditions in Indo-Portuguese Creole verse
Book 5 · Jan 1990 ·
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This study of literary themes, linguistic practice and cultural traditions analyzes the oral traditions of Indo-Portugese creole verse, as a synthesis from European, African and Asian sources. This musical, dramatic and textual syncretism defines tradition within the group and maintains the identity of the creole community. References are primarily to Indian and Sri Lankan materials collected in the late nineteenth century and to data in the H. Nevill collection, an extensive manuscript of Sri Lankan Creole texts from the 1870s or 1880s, housed in the British Museum. The importance of these texts is linguistic, anthropological and sociological. They are persistent in their ability to give definition to creole culture, surviving in South Asia from the seventeenth century to the present.
Pidgin and Creole Tense/Mood/Aspect Systems
Book 6 · Jan 1990 ·
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More than any other area of the grammar, tense-mood-aspect (TMA) has provided evidence to fuel the ongoing debates about creole genesis and about the relevance of pidgin and creole phenomena to language theory more generally. This volume advances the debate in two ways. First, it makes available in print for the first time and in its original form William Labov's On the Adequacy of Natural Languages: I. The Development of Tense. Second, the volume features detailed analyses of the TMA systems of seven diverse pidgins and creoles, which vary in terms of their lexifying (superstrate) languages, their location, and their social histories.With the authors employing a broad range of theoretical perspectives for their analyses, the study demonstrates both the extent to which pidgins and creoles share a single, prototypical TMA system and the degree to which individual pidgins and creoles diverge from that prototype. This is a volume that brings forward our knowledge and understanding of pidgin and creole TMA.The seven languages analyzed are: Capeverdean Crioulo, Kituba, Papiamentu, Berbice Dutch, Haitian Creole, Kru Pidgin English, and Eighteenth Century Nigerian Pidgin English.
History from Below: The Vocabulary of Elisabethville by André Yav: Text, Translations and Interpretive Essay
Book 7 · Jan 1990 ·
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Johannes Fabian with assistance from Kalundi Mango (Administrator, National Museum of Zaire) and with linguistic notes by Walter Schicho (University of Vienna). An extraordinary linguistic and sociopolitical document, this is a history of colonization written by the colonized, about the colonized, and for the colonized. The original text, a history of what is now Lubumbashi in the Shaba region of Zaire, is reproduced in exact facsimile in Part 1. The period covered is from the beginning of Belgian colonization to 1965. The text was commissioned by an association of former domestic servants and written, or compiled, by one Andre Yav. The facsimile text is followed by linguistic notes (provided by W. Schicho) on the variety of Swahili used by the author. In Part 2 this amazing document is twice translated: first, into an oralized' version in current Shaba Swahili and, second, into English. Numerous historical and linguistic notes make the text accessible to the non-specialist. While Parts 1 and 2 are of particular interest to linguists, Part 3 covers a wider area of intellectual concerns. It is an essay analyzing the social conditions, literary means and political purposes and importance of the history. Of interest to linguists, historians, sociologists and political scientists.
The Emergence of Black English: Text and commentary
Book 8 · Apr 1991 ·
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Debate over the evolution of Black English Vernacular (BEV) has permeated Afro-American studies, creole linguistics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics for a quarter of a century with little sign of a satisfactory resolution, primarily because evidence that bears directly on the earlier stages of BEV is sparse. This book brings together 11 transcripts of mechanical recordings of interviews with former slaves born well over a century ago. It attempts to make this crucial source of data as widely known as possible and to explore its importance for the study of Black English Vernacular in view of various problems of textual composition and interpretation. It does so by providing a complete description of the contents of the recordings, by providing transcripts of most of the contents, and by publishing a group of interpretive essays which examine the data in the light of other relevant historical, cultural, social, and linguistic evidence and which provide contexts for interpretation and analysis. In these essays a group of diverse scholars on BEV analyze the same texts for the first time; the lack of consensus that emerges may seem surprising, but in fact highlights some of the basic problems of textual composition and interpretation and of scholarly dispositions that underlie the study of BEV. The papers raise crucial questions about the evolution of BEV, about its relationship to other varieties, and, most important, about the construction and interpretation of linguistic texts.
Development and Structures of Creole Languages: Essays in honor of Derek Bickerton
Book 9 · Mar 1991 ·
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This collection of original essays is intended to both celebrate Derek Bickerton's sixty-fifth birthday and honor his long and eminent career. Each author included in the volume is a noted scholar who has distinguished him/herself in some area of linguistics and has professionally or personally interacted with Bickerton and been influenced by his work. While the papers make independent thematic contributions, they also discuss, augment, present alternatives to, or are inspired in some way by Bickerton's seminal ideas or penetrating analyses. The book is organized into 5 sections, each a reflection of a major research period in Bickerton's career: Section 1: Identifying Creoles; Section 2: Language Variation; Section 3: Creole Processes; Section 4: Creole Syntax and Semantics; Section 5: Serial Verbs.
Predication in Caribbean English Creoles
Book 10 · Jan 1993 ·
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This is the first major study of the conservative or basilectal English creoles of the Anglophone Caribbean since Bailey's (1966) and Bickerton's (1975) descriptions of Jamaican and Guyanese Creole respectively. The book offers a comprehensive, unified treatment of the core areas of CEC predication, including the verb complex, auxiliary ordering, voice and valency, copular and attributive predication, serial verb constructions and complementation. Particularly note-worthy is its utilization of an extremely rich data base and a variety of sources to provide an up-to-date, state of the art account of predicate structures in CEC. The book presents new analyses of several areas of CEC syntax, including such phenonema as passivization, serialization and complementation, which have not been thoroughly analyzed, if at all, in the previous literature. The areas covered in the book involve a wide range of grammatical phenomena centering around the various sub-classes of verb and their subcategorization. The book consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and six chapters, each of which explores some aspect of the behavior of verbs (or verb-like predicators) and the constructions in which they occur. The book is intended to be a pre-theoretical account of the facts of CEC predication. However, to further elucidate the workings of the grammar and add some degree of explicitness to the description, the author also presents more formal analyses of the grammatical phenomena, employing the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG).
Atlantic Meets Pacific: A global view of pidginization and creolization
Book 11 · Dec 1992 ·
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Selected papers from the Society for Pidgin and Creole linguistics.
Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages: Papers from the University of Chicago Conference on Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages
Book 12 · Oct 1993 ·
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The volume has as its topic, not only the types of formal constructions and devices which creole languages syntactically utilize to achieve constituent focus, but also, in a much broader sense, the many other phenomena and processes found in these languages which serve to highlight sentence-level elements. The book is organized into five sections: 1. verb focus, predicate clefting and predicate doubling; 2. focus and anti-focus; 3. focus and pronominals; 4. discourse patterning; 5. grammatical relations.
The Early Stages of Creolization
Book 13 · Jan 1996 ·
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This volume brings together a number of studies on the early stages of creolization which are entirely based on historical data. The recent (re)discovery of early documents written in creole languages such as Negerhollands, Bajan, and Sranan, allows for a detailed and empirically founded reconstruction of creolization as an historical-linguistic process. In addition, demographic and socio-historical evidence on some of the relevant former colonies, such as Surinam, Haiti, and Martinique, sheds new light on some crucial sociolinguistic aspects of creolization, such as the rate of nativization of the creole-speaking population. Both types of evidence relate to essential questions in the theory of creolization, such as: Is creolization a matter of first or second language acquisition? What are the respective roles of substrate, superstrate, and universal grammar in creole genesis? And, what, if any, are the differences between creole development and normal language change? The subjects discussed in this volume include: a comparative study of the historical development of seven pidgins and creoles (Baker); reflexives in 18th-century Negerhollands (Van der Voort & Muysken); the emergence of taki as a complementizer in Sranan (Plag); the historical development of relativization in Sranan (Bruyn); the cultural and demographic background of creolization in Haiti and Martinique (Singler); the creole nature of early Bajan (Field); a linguistic analysis of the so-called 'slave letters' in Negerhollands (Stein); and demographic factors in the formation of Sranan (Arends).
Kriyol Syntax: The Portuguese-based Creole language of Guinea-Bissau
Book 14 · Jul 1994 ·
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This book describes the Portuguese-based Creole which is widely spoken as a first language in Guinea-Bissau. The study focuses on one variety, 'central Kriyol', and its main aim is to present a complete description of the grammar of the language. The theoretical framework for the syntactic analysis is purposely eclectic but relies primarily on Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and ample attention is paid to the cognitive or semantic dimension in the explanation of linguistic facts. After a short introduction on the history and phonology of the language and the organization of the study, there are chapters dealing with the simple sentence, Tense and Aspect, the noun phrase, the complex sentence, topicalization/focalization/questions, and Middles/Passives/Causatives. The final chapter discusses Kriyol texts, especially comic-books, from which a considerable number of examples used in the study are taken.
Pidgins and Creoles: An introduction
Book 15 · Dec 1994 ·
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This introduction to the linguistic study of pidgin and creole languages is clearly designed as an introductory course book. It does not demand a high level of previous linguistic knowledge. Part I: General Aspects and Part II: Theories of Genesis constitute the core for presentation and discussion in the classroom, while Part III: Sketches of Individual Languages (such as Eskimo Pidgin, Haitian, Saramaccan, Shaba Swahili, Fa d'Ambu, Papiamentu, Sranan, Berbice Dutch) and Part IV: Grammatical Features (such as TMA particles and auxiliaries, noun phrases, reflexives, serial verbs, fronting) can form the basis for further exploration. A concluding chapter draws together the different strands of argumentation, and the annotated list provides the background information on several hundred pidgins, creoles and mixed languages.
Diversity rather than unity is taken to be the central theme, and for the first time in an introduction to pidgins and creoles, the Atlantic creoles receive the attention they deserve. Pidgins are not treated as necessarily an intermediate step on the way to creoles, but as linguistic entities in their own right with their own characteristics. In addition to pidgins, mixed languages are treated in a separate chapter.
Research on pidgin and creole languages during the past decade has yielded an abundance of uncovered material and new insights. This introduction, written jointly by the creolists of the University of Amsterdam, could not have been written without recourse to this new material.
Diversity rather than unity is taken to be the central theme, and for the first time in an introduction to pidgins and creoles, the Atlantic creoles receive the attention they deserve. Pidgins are not treated as necessarily an intermediate step on the way to creoles, but as linguistic entities in their own right with their own characteristics. In addition to pidgins, mixed languages are treated in a separate chapter.
Research on pidgin and creole languages during the past decade has yielded an abundance of uncovered material and new insights. This introduction, written jointly by the creolists of the University of Amsterdam, could not have been written without recourse to this new material.
The Genesis of a Language: The formation and development of Korlai Portuguese
Book 16 · Mar 1996 ·
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Korlai Portuguese (KP), a Portuguese-based creole only recently discovered by linguists, originated around 1520 on the west coast of India. Initially isolated from its Hindu and Muslim neighbors by social and religious barriers, the small Korlai community lost virtually all Portuguese contact as well after 1740. This volume is the first-ever comprehensive treatment of the formation, linguistic components, and rapidly changing situation of this exotic creole.
The product of ten years of research, Korlai Creole Portuguese provides an exciting, in-depth diachronic look at a language that is now showing the strain of intense cultural pressure from the surrounding Marathi-speaking population. Framed in Thomason and Kaufmans 1988 model of contact-induced language change, the authors analysis is enriched by numerous comparisons with sister creoles, apart from medieval Portuguese and Marathi.
This book contrastively examines the following areas:
phonemic inventories, phonological processes, stress assignment, syllable structure, paradigm restructuring, paradigm use, lexicon, word formation, semantic borrowing, loan translations, grammatical relation marking, pre- and postnominal modification, negation, subject and object deletion, embedding, and word order.
The product of ten years of research, Korlai Creole Portuguese provides an exciting, in-depth diachronic look at a language that is now showing the strain of intense cultural pressure from the surrounding Marathi-speaking population. Framed in Thomason and Kaufmans 1988 model of contact-induced language change, the authors analysis is enriched by numerous comparisons with sister creoles, apart from medieval Portuguese and Marathi.
This book contrastively examines the following areas:
phonemic inventories, phonological processes, stress assignment, syllable structure, paradigm restructuring, paradigm use, lexicon, word formation, semantic borrowing, loan translations, grammatical relation marking, pre- and postnominal modification, negation, subject and object deletion, embedding, and word order.
Contact Languages: A wider perspective
Book 17 · Mar 1997 ·
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This book contributes to a more balanced view of the most dramatic results of language contact by presenting linguistic and historical sketches of lesser-known contact languages. The twelve case studies offer eloquent testimony against the still common view that all contact languages are pidgins and creoles with maximally simple and essentially identical grammars. They show that some contact languages are neither pidgins nor creoles, and that even pidgins and creoles can display considerable structural diversity and structural complexity; they also show that two-language contact situations can give rise to pidgins, especially when access to a target language is withheld by its speakers. The chapters are arranged according to language type: three focus on pidgins (Hiri Motu, by Tom Dutton; Pidgin Delaware, by Ives Goddard; and Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin, by George L. Huttar and Frank J. Velantie), two on creoles (Kituba, by Salikoko S. Mufwene, and Sango, by Helma Pasch), one on a set of pidgins and creoles (Arabic-based contact languages, by Jonathan Owens), one on the question of early pidginization and/or creolization in Swahili (by Derek Nurse), and five on bilingual mixed languages (Michif, by Peter Bakker and Robert A. Papen; Media Lengua and Callahuaya, both by Pieter Muysken; and Mednyj Aleut and Ma’a, both by Sarah Thomason). The authors’ collective goal is to help offset the traditional emphasis, within contact-language studies, on pidgins and creoles that arose as an immediate result of contact with Europeans, starting in the Age of Exploration. The accumulation of case studies on a wide diversity of languages is needed to create a body of knowledge substantial enough to support robust generalizations about the nature and development of all types of contact language.
Creole and Dialect Continua: Standard acquisition processes in Belize and China (PRC)
Book 18 · Mar 1997 ·
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Although there is a substantial amount of linguistic research on standard language acquisition, little attention has been given to the mechanisms underlying second dialect acquisition. Using a combination of function-based grammar and sociolinguistic methodology to analyze topic marking strategies, the unguided acquisition of a standard by speakers of nonstandard varieties is examined in two distinct linguistic and geographical situations: in a Caribbean creole situation (Belize), with special attention to the acquisition of acrolects by native speakers of basilects, and in a noncreole situation (PRC), documenting the acquisition of standard Chinese (Putonghua) by speakers of nonstandard varieties represented in Cultural Revolution literature, Wuhan Chinese, and Suzhou Wu story-telling style. In both cases psychosocial factors, linguistic bias toward nonnative renderings of the standard varieties, the social status of their speakers, and related political and educational consequences play an important role in the development of second dialects. The broad-ranging analysis of a single feature of oral discourse leads to the formulation of cross-linguistic generalizations in acquisition studies and results in an evaluation of the putative uniqueness of creole languages. Related issues addressed include the effect of linguistic bias on the development and use of language varieties by marginalized groups; the interaction of three major language components semantics, syntax, and pragmatics in spontaneous communication; and the development of methods to identify discourse units. The ultimate goal underlying the comparison of specific discourse variables in Belizean and Chinese standard acquisition is to evaluate the relative merits of substratal, superstratal, and universal explanations in language development.
The Structure and Status of Pidgins and Creoles: Including selected papers from meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole linguistics
Book 19 · Oct 1997 ·
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Destined to become a landmark work, this book is devoted principally to a reassessment of the content, categories, boundaries, and basic assumptions of pidgin and creole studies. It includes revised and elaborated papers from meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in addition to commissioned papers from leading scholars in the field. As a group, the papers undertake this reassessment through a reevaluation of pidgin/creole terminology and contact language typology (Section One); a requestioning of process and evolution in pidginization, creolization, and other language contact phenomena (Section Two); a reinterpretation of the sources and genesis of grammatical aspects of Saramaccan and Atlantic creoles in general (Section Three); a reconsideration of the status of languages defying received definitions of pidgins and creoles (Section Four); and analyses of aspects of grammar that shed light on the issue of what a possible creole grammar is (Section Five).
Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse: Studies celebrating Charlene J. Sato
Book 20 · Dec 1999 ·
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This collection in honor of creolist Charlene Junko Sato (19511996) brings together contributions by leading specialists in pidgin-creole studies in three primary areas: Pidgin-Creole Genesis and Development; Attitudes and Education, and Creole Discourse and Literature. The varieties covered come from English, French and Spanish lexical bases and from places as far apart as Africa, Australia, Hawaii, and the Caribbean.
Editors Rickford and Romaine introduce each of the papers and provide a biography and bibliography of Sato. A short story and poems in Hawaiian Creole, Satos native language and the variety which was the focus of her research and writing, round out the collection.
Editors Rickford and Romaine introduce each of the papers and provide a biography and bibliography of Sato. A short story and poems in Hawaiian Creole, Satos native language and the variety which was the focus of her research and writing, round out the collection.
