26.2619, Review: General Linguistics: Cardoso, Baxter, Nunes (2012)

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Subject: 26.2619, Review: General Linguistics: Cardoso, Baxter, Nunes (2012)

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Date: Tue, 26 May 2015 13:14:29
From: Marilola Perez [marilola at berkeley.edu]
Subject: Ibero-Asian Creoles

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-5184.html

EDITOR: Hugo C.  Cardoso
EDITOR: Alan N.  Baxter
EDITOR: Mário  Pinharanda Nunes
TITLE: Ibero-Asian Creoles
SUBTITLE: Comparative Perspectives
SERIES TITLE: Creole Language Library 46
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Marilola Perez, University of California, Berkeley

Review's Editors: Helen Aristar-Dry and Sara Couture

SUMMARY

The papers in this volume were part of a conference entitled: “Ibero-Asian
Creoles: Comparative perspectives” held at the University of Macau on the 28th
and 29th of October, 2012. The conference was the first scholarly meeting
dedicated to the Portuguese- and Spanish-lexified Creoles of Asia.

In the 15th century, the Portuguese expansion started out as a series of
trading posts along the African coast, and extended through India reaching the
Southeast Asian territory. Despite the trading network’s magnitude, the
editors of this volume point out that “contact languages of Asia and the
Pacific remain less prominent than their Atlantic and American counterparts in
scholarly publications in the field of Creole Studies. Given the typological
diversity of their Asian and Southeast Asian source languages, the virtual
omission of these languages in contact language scholarship undermines the
descriptive adequacy of the contact language typology. Moreover, comparative
work is still virtually scarce with exceptions including Hancock (1975), Holm
(1989) and Clements (2000, 2002,2009). 

The papers in ‘Ibero-Asian Creoles in a comparative perspective’ contribute
data from previously unpublished extensive fieldwork conducted by some of the
leading experts in each of the represented languages.  

Similarities across Ibero-Asian contact varieties inspired early hypotheses
proposing a common Portuguese pidgin (Clements, 2000; Schuchardt, 1883;
Whinnom, 1956). Many of the papers in this volume refer to a common pidgin and
examine the amount of influence that it may have had on the creole varieties.
For example, Baxter and Bastos (p. 47) compare genitive constructions across
various Ibero-Asian creoles, and explain similarities as evidence of the
spread of a genitive construction from an India-based pidgin to Malacca. In
his contribution, Fernandez suggests separate developments for the
Spanish-lexified creoles (2007, 2009, 2010) and proposes a Spanish model for a
negation construction in Chabacano. He holds that the evidence favors “those
of us who do not hold with the idea of a single origin for all the Spanish
creoles of the Philippines” (231). 

The papers in this volume also address typological and sociolinguistic
challenges to studies of  their diachrony, such as typological similarities
among their adstrates, and continuous contact between contact languages and
their source languages (hence called in the volume ‘adstrates’ instead of
‘substrate’). 

The volume can be roughly split in three main groups: the first contains the
bulk of comparative papers that focus on the relationship between duration of
Portuguese presence and the structural weight of adstrate and lexifier.
Detailed discussions of adstrate effects are found in the second group of
papers. The last group of papers traces structural indicators of the lexifier.

Papers in this volume are: 

1. Introduction (1- 14), Hugo C. Cardoso, Alan N. Baxter and Mário Pinharanda
Nunes
2. Notes on the phonology and lexicon of some Indo- Portuguese creoles (15-
46), J. Clancy Clements
3. A closer look at the post-nominal genitive in Asian Creole Portuguese (47-
80), Alan N. Baxter and Augusta Bastos
4. Luso-Asian comparatives in comparison (81- 124), Hugo C. Cardoso
5. Measuring substrate influence: Word order features in Ibero-Asian Creoles
(125- 148), Ian Smith
6. Indefinite terms in Ibero-Asian Creoles (149-180), Eeva Sippola
7. Maskin, maski, masque… in the Spanish and Portuguese creoles of Asia: Same
particle, same provenance? (181-204), Nancy Vázquez Veiga and Mauro Fernández
8. Nenang, nino, nem nao, ni no: Similarities and differences (205- 238),
Mauro Fernández
9. Bilug in Zamboagueño Chavacano: the genericization of a substrate numeral
classifier (239- 262), Carl Rubino
10. Portuguese pidgin and Chinese Pidgin English in the Canton trade (263-
288), Stephen Matthews and Michelle Li
11. Traces of a superstrate verb inflection in Makista and other
Asian-Portuguese creoles (289- 326), Mário Pinharanda Nunes
12. Mindanao Chabacano and other ‘mixed creoles’: Sourcing the morphemic
components (327- 364), Anthony P. Grant

Clements begins papers in this volume showing that the degree to which
lexifier and adstrate languages are recruited in the contact language vary
among different linguistic systems. Adopting an evolutionary approach to
language change (Croft, 2000), the author suggests that historical and
structural differences between Northern and Southern Indian Creoles can be
explained as interplay of adstrate effects with the length of Portuguese
presence. He compares the structure of five Indian Portuguese Creoles (IPC)
and focuses on three “key differences” between these creoles: consonant and
vowel inventory, core lexicon, and syllabic structure. He finds that overall,
Northern Indian Creoles preserve more Portuguese segments than Southern
Indian, and proposes that the relatively short role of Portuguese presences in
the south can explain the absence of Portuguese consonants and vowels in
Southern IP. On the other hand, Clements finds that Southern Creoles preserve
more Portuguese syllabic structure than Northern Creoles and puts forward a
typological explanation based on Dravidian syllabic structure convergence with
Portuguese. He explains the different contact mechanisms, i.e. preserving
Portuguese features versus preserving adstrate features, as, respectively,
examples of borrowing versus language shift. 

In the next paper, Baxter and Bastos seek to understand the origin of contact
varieties and explain differences among them. The post nominal genitive ‘sa’
is among the set of Ibero-Asian creoles features associated with a common
Asian pidgin (Clements 2000, Ferraz 1987). The authors argue that the
Portuguese form is recruited based on the frequency of a Portuguese genitive
pronoun in early non-standard Portuguese varieties. In consonance with
Clements, they explain differences as Dravidian and Indo-Aryan
reinterpretations of the Portuguese post-nominal constructions. The authors
then shift their attention to the comparison of the post-nominal genitive in
Korlai, Mangalore, Sri Lanka, Malacca Batavia and Macau; they find that
functions associated to its lexifier form can be traced from Indian Creoles to
Malacca Creole, the easternmost Ibero-Asian creole. They also argue that
semantic trace of the original Portuguese pronoun in creole Malacca explains
the variation between ‘sa’ and a functionally similar form.  

In the next paper, Cardoso investigates the role of lexifier and adstrate
languages in comparative constructions across Diu, Daman, Korlai, Cannanore,
Batticaloa, Malacca, Batavia/Tugu and Macau. After describing the construction
in standard Portuguese, which has more available data compared to the likely
non-standard varieties, Cardoso follows up with descriptions of the
construction in each creole and their adstrate. The author organizes all the
creoles according to their ‘reliance on lexifier’ (p. 110), a point-based
computation used to quantify each creole’s similarity to the lexifier (vs.
adstrate). Cardoso finds that contact languages with longer Portuguese
presence (Diu, Daman) show the greatest similarity with Portuguese
constructions. Cardoso lists several exceptions to this general trend and
discusses some possibilities including the recruitment of forms from an
earlier Ibero-Asian pidgin. 

Smith’s work also examines the relationship between length of Portuguese
presence and its relationship with the relative weight of source languages in:
Sri Lanka, Malacca Creole, Batavia, Daman and Diu, Korlai, Sri Lanka,
Chabacano, and Makista. Smith’s selection of word order features comes from
the online version of the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures (APiCS)
(Michaelis, Maurer, Haspelmath, and Huber, 2013). The author employs a
point-based comparison metric (“Substrate Influence Score”) to measure the
similarities between each contact variety and its source languages. Under this
metric, similarity with lexifier is assigned a +1, similarity to adstrate is
-1, a partial similarity such as Korlai’s dominant adstrate based SOV order (a
shift from the lexifier’s SVO), can be +/- .5. Even though, as the author
acknowledges, the metric may carry some amount of arbitrariness, his results
are consistent with other articles in this volume. Regarding the lexifier, he
also finds a correlation between lexifier influence and degree of
Portuguese/Spanish presence in the major categories of Ibero Asian Creoles.
Meanwhile, languages with more than one adstrate (e.g. Malacca, Batavia) show
a tendency towards the earliest adstrate. Smith discusses his results based on
 the Lefevbre and Lumsden (1992) claim of lexifier determined word order in
creole formation. The author attributes exceptions to this generalization
(e.g.VSO in Chabacano) to post-creolization process. 

Sippola compares the forms of indefinite pronoun paradigms across a broad
range of ACP: Portuguese-lexified Diu, Korlai, Sri Lanka, Malacca, Macau and
three varieties of Chabacano and proposes different mechanisms to explain
variation between languages The comparison features are chosen based on formal
typological categories (Haspelmath, 1997) which include ‘special indefinite’,
‘interrogative based indefinite’ and ‘generic noun-based indefinites’. After
presenting examples of each category in each language, she finds that degree
of variation of indefinite terms between languages varies among kinds of
indefiniteness. Differences reflect their different adstrates, or
language-internal changes; on the other hand, pronominal terms are derived
from their superstrate languages (Spanish, Portuguese). Other processes such
as lexifier-adstrate convergence can further motivate the use of Ibero
indefinites. Sippola notes various caveats, which include the risk of making
faulty historical associations between creoles based on similarities that may
instead be explained by a shared genetic pool of the adstrates. Also, she
discusses the synchronic availability of alternative forms in many of these
creoles to emphasize the “generalizing bias of typological studies” and the
limitations of data that do not account for lectal variation, *including*
register variation. The last point is particularly important in the study of
Ibero-Asian varieties that have remained in contact with their source
languages. 

In their work, Fernandez and Vázquez consider the role of Spanish in the
development of the widespread concessive particle, ‘maski’. Like many other
widespread features, the particle has been traced back to a Portuguese pidgin
(Whinnom, 1956). Fernandez and Vázquez argue for a different origin and
present examples taken from 17th and 18th century Spanish grammars and
dictionaries that show the concessive use of a different source form ‘mas
que’. Then they show Zamboanga and Cavite Chabacano uses of ‘maski’ in
different texts and grammars where Chabacano ‘maski’ has “a new scalar or
intensifying function, in addition to that of a focal or indefinite
quantifier” of ‘maski’ in other Ibero Asian creoles (Sri Lanka, Malacca, Macau
and Tugu). The authors describe non-concessive functions and argue that they
are acquired from Philippine languages (p. 191). As evidence of the local
development of ‘maski’, the authors present the use of the particle in Spanish
with the Philippines functions in a text from a Spanish Jesuit missionary,
presumably from 18th or 19th century Chabacano (p. 196). According to the
authors, this text supports an account in which the Spanish-derived form
incorporated functions from the surrounding Philippine languages. Examples of
the different functions of ‘maski’ are taken from various texts appearing in
blogs written in Chabacano from Zamboanga.

In his second paper in this volume, Fernández compares the functions and forms
of a negation mark across contact languages to develop an account of some
possible paths of development. Fernández investigates the negation marker
across the Ibero-Asian creoles and different Portuguese varieties. He finds
that the functions of the particle in Kristang diverge from those found in
Portuguese and the other creoles. The author explains associated functions as
series of pragmatic presuppositions that lead to the relexification of a Malay
particle with the Portuguese form.  

In his paper, Rubino investigates functions of ‘bilug’, a noun classifier in
the Zamboanga variety of Chabacano. Noun classifiers are a common feature of
Southeast Asian languages, but highly rare in contact language varieties.
Given the absence of the numeric classifier in other Chabacano varieties,
Rubino points to the influence of southern Filipino adstrates including
Visayan languages, specifically Hiligayon. In a corpus-based study, Rubino
shows that, compared to numeral classifiers in the source languages, the
Zamboanga Chabacano classifier has diverged and widened its semantic scope
from marking things that can be counted to a more general individuation marker
(p. 246). He contrasts the uses of ‘bilug’ with an equivalent Spanish-derived
term ‘pidaso’ (Sp. pedazo), which is semantically and syntactically
constrained to pretty much the same contexts of use in Spanish. On the other
hand, in recent data from Chabacano-English code-switching examples, the
author notes that the English word ‘unit’ can be used in place of the noun
classifier. He argues that the general semantic concept of the classifier is
part of the conceptual organization of Zamboanga Chabacano speakers , and not
just superficial form borrowing (p. 256). A question worth asking is: why was
the Spanish form never used as a classifier? In general, the paper raises
questions concerning the extent of semantic transfer between different
language forms. 

After briefly describing the role of Portuguese in the China Trade, Matthew
and Li investigate which elements of Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) could have
been inherited from Macao Pidgin Portuguese (MPP). Specifically, they are
interested in exploring whether there is evidence to suggest that CPE is a
re-lexified form of MPP and set out to compare lexical and grammatical systems
of CPE and MPP. The authors examine various 18th and 19th century pidgin
pedagogical phrase books written for traders. At the lexical level, they find
a progression from the use of some Portuguese words in CPE to their
substitution with English forms. They also show equivalents in English and
Portuguese and suggest that Portuguese and English lexical items coexisted at
some point (p. 271). The authors describe the use of existential constructions
and a complementizer and show that neither can be analyzed as Cantonese or
English use. They use 16th century Portuguese texts as evidence to suggest
that despite their English-derived phonological forms, each term must have a
Portuguese source. They also show same functions in other Portuguese creoles
and non-standard varieties provide further proof of a Portuguese source. They
explain the terms’ development through a “softer” version of according to
which newer forms of an early auxiliary language (English) replaced an older
auxiliary language (Portuguese), but kept its influence in some aspects of the
grammar (p. 282). 

In the next paper Pinharanda Nunes investigates the origin of verbal
inflectional morphology (3sg,1sg, Past Perfective/Imperfective) in Makista. He
identifies basilectal use by the additional presence of aspectual markers
and/or differences in aspectual/tense information from the superstrate. The
author shows that the distribution of the verbal inflectional morphology is
not uniform across all verb forms. Pinharanda notes that, in regard to verbal
inflectional morphology, Makista is more functionally similar to Northern
Indian Creoles (Daman, Diu and Korlai), than to the closer Malacca Creole.
Since Pinharanda does not find superstrate derived forms in earlier data, he
argues that inflectional morphology must have been a relatively recent
decreolization development. His historical data does not match Northern Indian
Creoles data, which shows inflectional morphology during creolization (Luís,
2008). The later acquisition of inflectional morphology in Makista also
explains the acrolectal range of items and functions observed in Makista in
relation to NIC (p. 294). The last section of the paper gives a
sociohistorical context of decreolization in Makista.

In his paper, Grant continues the topic of post-creolization structural
effects of lexifier languages with a discussion of ‘Mixed Creoles’, which are
defined as “one for which at least 10% of the Swadesh list derives from
languages other than the chief lexifier” (p. 328). Grant contrasts Mixed
Creole and ‘Mixed Languages’ (Matras and Bakker, 2003), and points out that,
unlike mixed creoles, “mixed languages use (somewhat regularized, less
allomorph-heavy and scaled-down) versions of sets of their contributory
languages’ inflectional (and often derivational) morphology (p. 346). On the
other hand, Mixed Creoles also show a more heterogenous distribution of
morphology between each of their source languages. Grant finds a weak
correlation between the set of borrowed basic lexicon and the proportion of
borrowed structural features. He suggests that results may be understood if
two borrowing pathways are considered: Portuguese lexicon may have been
borrowed from an early Portuguese pidgin (e.g. Angolar lexicon from Sao Tomé
pidgin), or directly from substrate and adstrate languages uniform lexicon
(Mindanao Chabacano (p. 355)). The category of ‘Mixed Creoles’ offers a new
typological framework to understand contact languages, such as Ibero-Asian
contact languages, which have had later periods of re-structuration over an
already crystallized contact language. Grant’s paper also points out a caveat
against any structural predictions based on the typological category of the
lexifier .

EVALUATION

Each paper in this volume is supported by extensive and careful data,
accompanied by contextual and historical information, such as an emphasis on
lectal and register variation (e.g. Sippola, Cardoso). The selection of papers
successfully represent some of the main issues in Ibero-Asian creole studies,
such as identifying source languages among typological similar adstrates,
establishing a diachrony of source languages in a setting where the creole
remains in contact with its source languages, and relatedly, accounting for
synchronic variation between adstrate and lexifier forms. 
 
The volume is also successful in showing the interrelatedness and structural
similarities among the examined creoles. As an added strength, feature spread
descriptions are consistently supported by extensive historical evidence.
Given the comparative goal of many of these papers, the data could overwhelm
the reader and proof hard to follow. However, the presentation of data, and
the summary of results are achieved with great clarity. The volume’s charts
and tables provide an invaluable reference source for future research. 

Despite its invaluable contribution to present a comprehensive view of some of
the main issues concerning Ibero-Asian creoles, sometimes the discussion of
the data in the individual papers seem too committed to a ‘founder’s
principle’ analysis. That is, the analyses of structural effects of contact in
each individual contribution uniformly explain the presence of features in
terms of their source languages, and most papers do not consider the
possibility that these are independent innovations or parallel developments. 

The focus on lexifier/adstrate derived structures might be especially
troublesome for features that have been traditionally associated with
grammaticalization tendencies possibly arising from common processes of
creole/contact variety development. A discussion regarding this aspect is
explicitly discussed by Grant with an example from serial verbs. On the other
hand, the source language influence is just assumed as the default explanation
in other papers, even when the feature is admittedly cross-linguistically
common such as double negation constructions (Fernandez pg. 219). 
Nonetheless, the volume’s focus on adstrate and lexifier effects is not
necessarily a terrible weakness; these explanations might be valuable to know
correspondences between source and contact languages, especially in this
understudied language area. In the end, the volume does what it sets out to
do: help characterize the language area of Ibero-Asian contact languages,
including some of the main issues that will surely inspire future research.

REFERENCES

Baxter, A. N. (1988). A grammar of Kristang: (Malacca Creole Portuguese. Dept.
of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National
University.

Clements, J. C. (1996). The Genesis of a Language: The Formation and
Development of Korlai Portuguese. John Benjamins Publishing.

Clements, J. C., and Koontz‐Garboden, A. (2002). Two Indo-Portuguese Creoles
in contrast. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 17(2), 191–236.
doi:10.1075/jpcl.17.2.03cle.

Croft, W. (2000). Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach.
Pearson Education.

Dalgado, S. R. (1913). Influência do vocabulário português em línguas
asiáticas:(abrangendo cêrca de cinqúenta idiomas). Impr. da Universidade.

Hancock, I. F. (1975). Malacca Creole Portuguese: Asian, African or European?
Anthropological Linguistics, 17(5), 211–236. doi:10.2307/30027570

Haspelmath, M. (1997). Indefinite pronouns. Clarendon Press Oxford. Retrieved
from http://www.lavoisier.fr/livre/notice.asp?ouvrage=1162018

Holm, J. A. (1989). Pidgins and Creoles: Volume 2, Reference Survey. Cambridge
University Press.

Luís, A. R. (2008). Tense marking and inflectional morphology in
Indo-Portuguese creoles. Roots of Creole Structures: Weighing the contribution
of substrates and superstrates, 83–121.

Matras, Y., and Bakker, P. (2003). The study of mixed Languages. In The mixed
language debate: theoretical and empirical advances (p. 1). Walter de Gruyter.

McWhorter, J. H. (1998). Identifying the Creole Prototype: Vindicating a
Typological Class. Language, 74(4), 788–818.

Michaelis, S. M., Maurer, P., Haspelmath, M., and Huber. (2013). Atlas of
Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved November 2, 2013, from
http://apics-online.info

Pinharanda Nunes, M. (2011). Estudo da Expressao Morfo-Sintactica das
Categorias de Tempo, Modo e Aspecto em Maquista. University of Macau, Macau.

Rubino, C. (2008). Zamboangue\ no Chavacano and the potentive mode. Roots of
Creole structures: weighing the contribution of substrates and superstrates,
279.

Schuchardt, H. (1883). Kreolische Studien IV: über das Malaiospanische der
Philippinen : Schuchardt, Hugo : Free Download and Streaming : Internet
Archive. In Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Wien (Vol. 105). Retrieved from
http://www.archive.org/details/rosettaproject_cbk_morsyn-2

Sippola, E. (2011). Una gramática descriptiva del Chabacano de Ternate.
Universidad de Helsinski, Helsinski.

Whinnom, K. (1956). Spanish contact vernaculars in the Philippine Islands.
Hong Kong University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marilola Perez is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at the University of
California at Berkeley. Her academic interests are in the areas of
sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and
(post)colonialism. Her dissertation examines Philippine Creole Spanish
'Chabacano', a Spanish-lexified contact language spoken on the Philippines.



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