<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>/we/ relative clauses across creoles -
summary</title></head><body>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000">I would like the
thank the many people who took the time to rely to my recent query on
/we/ as the means for introducing relative clauses in English based
creoles. I posted variations on the same query (with a slightly
different spin in each case) to three lists (CreoleTalk; Austronesian
Languages; Association for Social Anthropologists in Oceania). My
summary of responses will draw on the replies I got from all three
sources, both in the interest of precision and comprehensiveness. (And
my apologies for the cross-postings to some people.)<br>
<br>
I received replied from: Gerry Beimers, Terry Brown, Ross Clark,
Vincent Cooper, Lise Dobrin, Joseph Farquharson, Malcolm Finney, Alex
François, David Frank, Paul Geraghty, Philip Gibbs, Ron Kephart,
Thomas Klein, Jari Kupiainen, Rena Lederman, Eva Lindstrom, Bill
McKellin, Salikoko Mufwene, Peter Patrick, Elizabeth Pearce, Robert
Philips, Paula Prescod, John Singler, David Sutcliffe, and Bill
Thurston. Thanks so much to all of you, especially the people who sent
so much terrific data based on their own experience with different
creoles, or who took the time to search through corpora for
spontaneous examples of /we/ relativisers.<br>
<br>
Several people referred me to:<br>
Philip Baker and Magnus Huber 2001. Atlantic, Pacific, and world-wide
features in English-lexicon contact languages.<i> English
World-Wide</i>. 22. 157-208. </font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2"
color="#000000"> Based on
Baker's extraordinary collection of early creole texts, this article
gives earliest attestations for a /we/ relativiser in Gullah (US
South, 1891), Jamaican (Caribbean, 1941), Krio (West Africa, 1882),
West African Pidgin English (1926), Melanesian Pidgin English
(Pacific, 1913). On the basis of this, B&H classify /we/ as a
"world-wide" feature.</font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000">In what follows,
I've split the responses up into two sections (Pacific and Atlantic)
so different groups of readers can focus on the bits they might be
more directly interested in.</font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"><br>
<i>Pacific creoles<br>
<br>
</i>Although the earliest teach-yourself-Tok-Pisin book by Dutton does
not give /we/ as a general relativiser, correspondents pointed out
that Dutton & Thomas 1985<i> A New Course in Tok Pisin</i>.
Canberra: Pacific Linguistics does.<br>
<br>
Geoff Smith 2002.<i> Growing Up with Tok Pisin</i>. London:
Battlebridge Publications.<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Smith's vast corpus of adolescents'
spoken Tok Pisin also attests /we/ forms but these do not seem to be
distributed evenly across all regional dialects.<br>
Some researchers who
mainly use Tok Pisin in the Highlands (or who learnt it there some
time ago) indicate that /we/ is not widely used there, and suggest
that relative clauses are marked through intonation rather than
syntactically.<br>
People familiar with
New Britain report noticing it cropping up there in the late 1980s,
but say that the more usual form for relativising is/was the clause
bracketing structure discussed by Gillian Sankoff (i.e. [N [<i>ia Š
ia</i>]]).</font><br>
<font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000">Likewise there
seems to be dialectal variation in the frequency and distribution of
<wea> forms in Solomons Pijin (some respondents felt that the
more common strategy might be parataxis or clauses joined without an
overt co-ordinator like 'and', or argument doubling. However <wea>
is attested for Pijin as early as 1978 (Simons & Young) and has an
entry in Christine Jourdan's recent dictionary.</font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"><br>
Fiji English also uses <where> to introduce many relatives (not
only temporal or spatial), and Anna Shnukal's work on Broken (Torres
Strait) provides at least one example of /we/ being used as a general
relativiser.</font><br>
<font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000">For Bislama the
substrate parallels for /we/ as a relativiser are widespread and very
robust.</font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2"
color="#000000"><x-tab>
</x-tab>Substrate parallels possibly also account for some of the
regionally "idiosyncractic" uses of <we> in Bislama, e.g. to
introduce clauses giving an intensive reading, e.g.<i> I hot we i
hot</i> 'It's really hot'. Alex François and Liz Pearce noted robust
parallels with the diverse functions of Bislama /we/ in Mwotlap and
Unua (respectively). It's possible that Bislama has innovated what we
might call the "stranding" of /we/, i.e.<i> I hot we i hot =
I hot we.</i> Mwtolap, for instance, does not allow the stranding of
the equivalent complementiser introducing an intensifying
clause.</font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2"
color="#000000"><x-tab>
</x-tab>As far as I have been able to find out this use of /we/ is
unattested in Solomons Pijin at present. I don't know whether or not
it occurs at all in Tok Pisin. My guess would be not.</font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"><br>
<i>Atlantic creoles<br>
<br>
</i>Malcolm Finney is working on Krio and discussed /we/ relatives in
a recent paper "Complementation in Krio and Lexifier English:
Implications for<br>
Syntactic Theory" at the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics
in Albuquerque in January 2006.<br>
<br>
John Singler searched his corpora of West African Englishes and
reports: "I checked in the three Liberian varieties I work on.
Liberian Settler English, the African-American enclave variety,
pidginized Vernacular Liberian English, and Kru Pidgin English. LSE
doesn't have it. It's rare in VLE, a feature of the speech of older
speakers who speak VLE as L2 variety. Younger speakers don't use
it. Older speakers who aren't as fluent as these two men also
don't seem to use it. KPE uses it. "<br>
<br>
/Wa/ forms are abundant in the Gullah New Testament. David Frank found
more than 7000 tokens and estimates that about half the uses of /wa/
are relativisers. David Sutcliffe writes that it may not be widely
known "older / conservative southern AAE (African American English)
also has where / weh relative".</font><br>
<font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000">In the Caribbean,
a number of languages introduce relative clauses with /we/. Although
there is some dispute about how long /we/-introduced relatives have
been used in Jamaican, there is no doubt that it is well-established
now as a general relativiser.</font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"><br>
Paula Prescod 2004 (<i>Une description grammaticale du syntagme
nominal</i></font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"><i>dans le
créole anglophone de St-Vincent-et-les-Grenadines</i>. Paris.) finds
/we/ used in Vincentian creole to introduce relative clauses on
persons, things and places. I also have noticed a number of examples
in Bequian. Ron Kephart notes it on Carriacou (Grenada) and apparently
it occurs in St Kitts-Nevis creole as well.</font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000"><br>
Other references that people provided in which /we/ relativisers are
mentioned:<br>
-Gilman & Mufwene 1987. How African is Gullah and why?<i>
American Speech</i><br>
-Bailey, B. L. 1966.<i> Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational
Approach</i>. Cambridge: University Press.<br>
-Robert Philips Bidialectal Instructional Theory II</font><font
face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#0000FF"><u>
www.kingcreole5.blogspot.com<br>
</u></font><font face="Garamond" size="+2" color="#000000">-Peter L
Patrick (2005), "Jamaican Creole morphology and syntax." In<i> A
Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol 2: Morphology and Syntax,</i>
ed. B Kortmann, EW Schneider, C Upton, R Mesthrie, K Burridge. Berlin:
Mouton.<br>
</font><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000">-Mufwene,
Salikoko 1986. Restrictive relativization in Gullah.<i> Journal of
Pidgin and Creole Languages</i>. 1. (includes comparison w. Jamaican
/we/).<br>
<br>
<br>
Again,<i> tangku tumas we yufala i givhan olsem.</i></font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2"
color="#000000"><i><br></i></font></div>
<div><font face="Palatino" size="+2" color="#000000">Best,
Miriam</font></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>Miriam Meyerhoff<br>
Reader, Linguistics & English Language<br>
University of Edinburgh<br>
14 Buccleuch Place<br>
Edinburgh EH8 9LN<br>
SCOTLAND<br>
<br>
ph.: +44 131 650-3961/3628 (main office) or 651-1836 (direct line)<br>
fax: +44 131 650-6883<br>
<br>
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~mhoff</div>
</body>
</html>