16.842, Review: Socioling/Creole Lang: Escure & Schwegler (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-842. Sat Mar 19 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.842, Review: Socioling/Creole Lang: Escure & Schwegler (2004)

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1)
Date: 17-Mar-2005
From: Thomas Klein < tklein at georgiasouthern.edu >
Subject: Creoles, Contact, and Language Change 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 15:26:39
From: Thomas Klein < tklein at georgiasouthern.edu >
Subject: Creoles, Contact, and Language Change 
 

EDITORS: Escure, Geneviève; Schwegler, Armin
TITLE: Creoles, Contact, and Language Change
SUBTITLE: Linguistic and social implications
SERIES: Creole Language Library 27
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3039.html


Thomas B. Klein, Department of Writing and Linguistics/ Georgia Southern 
University

This book is a collection of papers from meetings of the Society for 
Pidgin and Creole Linguistics held in 2001 and 2002. Only fifteen out of 
thirty-one original submissions have been accepted for publication. Peer 
reviews by multiple referees for each article have helped in revising and 
extending the original conference papers. Presenting a total of fifteen 
chapters, the volume is organized in four parts: Historical matters, 
acquisition, aspects of structure, and issues of discourse and identity. 
Pacific Creoles (Macanese, Hawaiian, Tok Pisin) are addressed in three 
contributions, data from Indian Ocean Creoles (Morisyen, Seselwa) figure 
in two chapters, whereas Atlantic Creoles and contact languages (African 
American Vernacular English, Garifuna, Gullah, Jamaican Creole English, 
Eastern Maroon Creole, Guadeloupean, Haitian, Krio, Limonese, Palenquero, 
Sranan, St. Lucian Creole, Tonga Portuguese) are investigated in twelve of 
the articles. Thus, the collection is rich in its coverage of the Atlantic 
linguistic landscape, but explores varieties in other areas of the globe 
as well.  Two pieces speak primarily to phonological matters, eight of the 
essays focus on morphosyntactic themes, whereas two chapters look into 
both structural areas. Therefore, issues of morphology and syntax play a 
superordinate role, but sound structure receives some important coverage 
as well.

Following a brief preface by the editors, the first chapter in the 
historical section is by Umberto Ansaldo and Stephen Matthews. They 
describe reduplication in Macanese, the Portuguese-based Creole of Macao, 
and examine its origins. The main data source is the literary work of a 
native author. Evidence is presented for productive reduplication of 
nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, numerals, and onomatopoeia. All 
productive reduplication is total, that is, whole words are reduplicated 
to convey grammatical functions. The authors argue for close parallels of 
pluralizing nominal reduplication and adverbial reduplication in the Malay 
substrate and in Sinitic adstrates, respectively. Three possible 
explanations are offered for the remaining patterns: pidgin Portuguese 
brought from the Gulf of Guinea colonies, convergence of Malay and Sinitic 
structures, or independent development following universal patterns. 
Bakker's 2003 work is helpful in weighing these options. He demonstrates 
that pidgins generally lack reduplication. In light of this evidence, 
pidgin Portuguese does not appear as a likely source of the observed 
reduplication patterns in Macanese. 

Margot van den Berg and Jacques Arends make a case for 17th- and 18th-
centruy court records as a source of authentic early Sranan. The 
punishment of slaves for felonies during this time period in Suriname had 
to be decided in court, so that depositions, statements, and reports of 
examinations exist that contain verbal testimony from Blacks. The authors 
advance two arguments for the authenticity of such records. First, it 
seems likely that they were intended as verbatim accounts. Secondly, 
certain distinctive linguistic features of the records are also found in 
other textual materials containing early Sranan. The documents examined 
contain about five hundred isolated words and some fifty short sentences 
in Sranan. The authors utilize the sentences to examine the use of a form 
meaning 'man, be able to, have the nerve to', the expression of 
counterfactuality in the TMA system, and the development of the copula 
system. Lexical, phonological, and morphological issues are left for 
future investigation. It appears that data from these court records may be 
a significant supplement to the evidence for early Sranan. Creolists are 
fortunate in having been made aware of this important source.

Garifuna, described and analyzed by Geneviève Escure, is a moribund mixed 
language spoken by members of the oldest generation of Black Caribs in 
Belize and Honduras. French, English, and Spanish borrowings have combined 
with the original Arawak and Carib components in historical and present-
day stages of the language. Casual Garifuna conversations read like a 
linguistic patchwork. Out of sixty morphemes in five example sentences, 
twenty-two are of Arawak origin, eight are from Carib, eighteen from 
French, six from Spanish, three from English or Creole English, and one is 
from Bantu. French, Spanish, and English (Creole) loanwords as well as 
certain grammaticalization patterns are described in some detail. Escure 
presents data to support her idea that linguistic attrition in Garifuna 
has initiated a trend away from synthetic morphology towards analytic 
morphosyntax. She suggests that patterns of obsolescence in the language 
are reminiscent of and, hence, hint at processes observed in pidginization 
or creolization. This new evidence implying parallels between language 
death and language birth deserves the attention of creolists and scholars 
dealing with language endangerment.

Magnus Huber investigates if earlier varieties of African American 
Vernacular English and/or Gullah could have influenced Sierra Leonean 
Krio. He finds that about eighty-five percent of the Nova Scotian settlers 
to Sierra Leone originally came from Virginia, North and South Carolina, 
and Georgia. Letters written by these Black Loyalists are analyzed 
linguistically to shed light on non-standard features in the phonology and 
morphology of the speech of this group. The analysis shows a good degree 
of homogeneity among the letters by writers from Virginia and South 
Carolina. This suggests that similar degrees of restructuring of English 
may have been present around the Chesapeake Bay and in areas associated 
with the origin of Gullah. Huber's hypothesis that the transshipment of 
Black Loyalists from the South to Nova Scotia and onwards to Sierra Leone 
may explain the similarities between Gullah and Krio should spur 
discussion in future works.

Alan N. Baxter's chapter opens the section on acquisition. He presents 
sociolinguistic interview data on variable NP plural agreement in Tonga 
Portuguese, a restructured variety spoken by descendants of Africans 
contracted to work on the Monte Café plantation of São Tomé in the 19th 
and 20th centuries. Across three generations this group uses ever more 
plural agreement morphology, with the youngest generation displaying it 
the most. Four conditioning factors are shown to play a role in the 
appearance of plural morphology: the morphophonological saliency of the 
plural word, the following phonological context, the structural 
configuration of the NP, and whether informants had at least one African 
parent, or locally born parents. Baxter argues that the change in variable 
plural marking is causally connected to patterns in the L2 and L1 
acquisition of Portuguese in the community. This paper nicely demonstrates 
how complex factors may conspire to produce linguistic change in apparent 
time in a creole-type contact situation.  

Fred Field argues that processability of second language linguistic 
structures is involved in the genesis of a Creole language. Processability 
is dependent on the complexity of form with respect to its function or 
meaning. Field invokes a hierarchy adapted from work on the acquisition of 
English as a second language. Single-word utterances make up the simplest 
processability level, whereas the cancellation of subject-auxiliary 
inversion in indirect discourse ranks with the highest level. Data from 
Hawaiian and Jamaican Creole English, Tok Pisin, and Palenquero are 
adduced to support the view that these Creole languages do not feature 
structures above a certain processability level. This is then taken as 
structural evidence for an important role of second language acquisition 
in the emergence of a Creole language. The author makes clear, however, 
that he is not implying that second language acquisition is the only 
possible explanation in Creole genesis. 

The acquisition of Jamaican syllable structure and its analysis in the 
Optimality Theory (OT) framework is the subject of Rocky R. Meade's 
article. The data come from a longitudinal study of a basilectal and a 
mesolectal/acrolectal group of children. The children's development 
profile is examined in terms of syllable structure types such as V, CV, 
CVC, and (C)CVC(C). Significantly, all children follow a similar path in 
the sequence of the stages observed regardless of linguistically 
significant socio-economic differences. The OT analysis demonstrates that 
re-ranking of universal syllable structure constraints in the course of 
the developmental process accounts for the sequence of acquisition. Given 
the scarcity of developmental data speaking to the first language 
acquisition of Creole phonology, this study makes an important empirical 
and theoretical contribution.

The third part of the book, "Aspects of structure", begins with a chapter 
by Dany Adone. She argues that the Double-object construction (NP NP) is 
the default structure associated with ditransitive verbs in Morisyen and 
Seselwa, even though prepositional complement structures [NP to NP] also 
occur at the surface. The bulk of the article is devoted to the syntactic 
analysis of the two structures based on data obtained by the author from 
adult native speakers of the two languages in focus. Reference to 
acquisition and sign language data is made in two paragraphs in the 
concluding remarks. This chapter should be of interest primarily to 
syntacticians, but it has implications for acquisition research as well.

A corpus-based study on the dialectal variability of passive voice in 
Papiamento is the subject of Eva Martha Eckkrammer's paper. The data are 
extracted from a digitized corpus of 600,000 words of predominantly 
written text. The study investigates three passive markers and cross-
references their occurrence in two sub-corpora, one with data from Curaçao 
and Bonaire, the other with texts from Aruba. The quantitative analysis 
reveals that Aruban Papiamento prefers two passive markers whereas the 
Curaçao and Bonaire variety uses all three roughly equivalently, thereby 
showing a lesser degree of Dutch influence. These results are of interest 
to Creole syntacticians and to scholars interested in Papiamento dialectal 
variation.

Malcolm Awadajin Finney invigorates the case for Krio as a tone language. 
He presents data to show that tone is used contrastively in Krio to 
distinguish lexical items of African and English origin. Furthermore, it 
is demonstrated that tone is only partially predictable in polysyllabic 
items of English origin. In addition, the location of primary stress in 
English corresponds only in part to the occurrence of high tone in Krio. 
The regular presence of initial low tone in Krio compounds is accounted 
for by positing a rule of high tone deletion and low tone spread. Given 
that Krio does not appear to employ tone to mark grammatical categories, 
the debate if it is a true tone language is likely to continue.  However, 
Finney's work undoubtedly helps to put the discussion on solid footing.

The article by David B. Frank examines the correlation between tense-mood-
aspect (TMA) markers and the stative/nonstative distinction among verbs in 
St. Lucian French Creole. Fresh data from the author's fieldwork are 
employed throughout. The primary factor governing the TMA patterns is the 
stative or nonstative nature of the verb. In order to fully account for 
TMA usage in St. Lucian, however, it is shown that other factors must be 
taken into account such as whether the verb phrase in question is in an 
independent or dependent clause, in reported speech, or in a marked 
position of a narrative. Given the essential role that questions about TMA 
systems play in Creole studies, this article should find a wide readership.

A paper on the Limonese calypso by Anita Herzfeld in collaboration with 
David Moskowitz is first in the section on discourse and identity. Several 
types of Calypso lyrics are presented and are considered as an identity 
marker and a significant factor in aiding the maintenance of Limonese 
Creole in Costa Rica. The messages of the lyrics express an alternative 
worldview, one that has good potential to be meaningful to the Afro-
Limonese. Thus, the lyrics may facilitate a positive attitude of the 
Limonese themselves and their language. This article usefully reminds 
readers that music, in addition to language, plays an important role in 
creating and maintaining the identity of a people.

Kuutu council meetings are an important formal event in the Pamaka Eastern 
Maroon community of Suriname. Bettina Migge describes and analyzes social 
and linguistic properties of the kuutu to shed light on the communicative 
competence of its participants. Linguistic practices include structured 
turns and turn-taking, specific language and word choices, address forms, 
and figures of speech. There are distinct social rules of conduct, and 
active participation is restricted to people who hold high status. This 
work is a rare document of structured discourse in a Maroon community and 
provides unique insight into an understudied aspect of the linguistic 
repertoire of Creole speakers. 

Katrin Mutz presents a study of reflexivity in several French-based Creole 
languages. She demonstrates that the choice of reflexive construction may 
depend on the semantics and the valency structure of the verb, its 
occurrence in spoken versus written language, lexicalization matters, and 
discourse context. Data are also presented to show that the reflexive 
elements convey at least one other non-reflexive function. The author 
argues that the non-reflexive functions represent precursors in the 
grammaticalization process towards markers of reflexivity. This chapter 
should be a useful contribution to the literature on reflexivity and 
grammaticalization in Creole languages.

The chapter by Sarah J. Roberts on the role of style and identity in the 
development of Hawaiian Creole completes the volume. The author considers 
how linguistic ideology and group identity factors may have influenced the 
development of Creole continua. Linguistic elaboration in the development 
of Hawaiian Creole English, including basilect formation, may thus be 
understood as essentially stylistic along trajectories of linguistic 
divergence or convergence. According to this view, the language became 
increasingly invested with identity-marking functions and thus became ever 
more important in differentiating local identities. Given the recurrence 
of structured speech dimensions in human societies, this article has the 
potential for significant cross-fertilization in the understanding of 
speech continua in Creole societies and elsewhere.   

This volume has been done very well overall. It clearly shows the benefits 
of stringent editorship and peer reviewing. The work of its authors 
represents a window into the state-of-the-art in Creole studies and 
beyond. It should not be missing in any collection with holdings on Creole 
or contact languages.

REFERENCES

Bakker, Peter (2003) The absence of reduplication in Pidgins. In Silvia 
Kouwenberg, ed. Twice as meaningful: Morphological reduplication in 
Pidgins, Creoles, and other contact languages, pp. 37-46. London: 
Battlebridge. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Thomas B. Klein is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department 
of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University. His research 
specializations are in phonology and Creole studies.





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