28.2786, Review: Principense; General Linguistics; Language Documentation; Phonology; Sociolinguistics: Agostinho (2016)

Thu Jun 22 14:50:06 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2786. Thu Jun 22 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2786, Review: Principense; General Linguistics; Language Documentation; Phonology; Sociolinguistics: Agostinho (2016)

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Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2017 10:50:01
From: Emmanuel Schang [emmanuel.schang at univ-orleans.fr]
Subject: Fonologia do lung'Ie

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2125.html

AUTHOR: Ana Lívia dos Santos  Agostinho
TITLE: Fonologia do lung’Ie
SERIES TITLE: LINCOM Studies in Pidgin & Creole Linguistics 15
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Emmanuel Schang, University of Orléans

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

Summary 

This short book (145 pages all included) deals with the phonology of the
Portuguese-based Creole of the Gulf of Guinea named lung'Ie (also known as
Príncipense) which is spoken on the island of Príncipe (República Democrática
de São Tomé e Príncipe). This volume, based on a Ph.D. dissertation defended
in 2014 at the University of São Paulo (Brasil), is written in Portuguese. The
author, Ana Lívia dos Santos Agostinho (henceforth ALSA), is a teacher at the
Departamento de Língua e Literatura Vernáculas da Universidade Federal of
Santa Catarina (Brasil). The language studied here is known as an endangered
language. It is only spoken by a few tens of people, and suffers from the
rivalry of Portuguese and two other Creole languages: Cape-Verdean and Forro
(the main Creole language of São Tomé Island). In this context, a book
dedicated to the phonology of lung'Ie (henceforth LI), literally 'the language
of the Island' is more than welcomed. ALSA based her work on fieldwork studies
during which she collected the material described in this book. She also makes
use of the two previous major descriptions of LI: Günther (1973) and Maurer
(2009). 
Chapter 1 is a short introduction (16 pages) presenting the language under
study, the methodology and a meager presentation of the linguistic literature
about the Gulf of Guinea Creoles. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the phonological
inventory. It is well constructed and richly illustrated by numerous examples.
The vowel inventory is similar to the one presented in Maurer (2009) and as
for the consonants, the author discusses specifically nasals, labial-velar
consonants (‘kp’ and ‘gb’) and the status of the fricative consonants, where
her analyses differ from those found in Maurer (2009). Chapter 3 deals with
the syllabic structure, focusing on long vowels, glides and syllabic nasals.
The study is based on a collection of 3,907 words and provides quantified
results on syllabic shape distribution. Chapter 4 (9 pages) presents some
information about tone and accent, which is a crucial feature for creolist
studies and a matter of debate (see diverging analyses in Günther (1973),
Ferraz & Trail (1981) and Maurer (2009)). Chapter 5 discusses some synchronic
phonological processes : apheresis, diphthongs, nasalization, sandhi rules,
etc. Chapter 6 concludes in three pages this short volume. 

Evaluation 

This book deals with with a phonological description of LI, couched in the
mainstream generative framework (autosegmental phonology for tone and accent
analyses) and treats interesting elements of the phonology of Lung'Ie. The
analyses are presented in a very clear way, which, I think, allows a reader
with only a basic knowledge of Portuguese to read the book without  much
effort. Many examples are provided to support the author's claims, which makes
this book a valuable resource for all linguists. However, this is not a book
about creolistics, for the following reasons. The author knowingly confines
herself to synchronic studies, which is a laudable approach, but this leads
her to problematic formulations. Let me develop one example. When dealing with
phonological processes, ALSA describes the alternation [ʃi'kɔlɐ] / [ʃ'kɔlɐ] as
a syncope, which is only correct on the assumption that [ʃi'kɔlɐ] is the
initial form. But this clearly misses the links with the Portuguese etymon
‘escola’ “school” which gives the form ‘iskola’ in Casamance, ‘skola’ in
Santiago (Cap Verde) and ‘xkola’ in Forro (another Gulf of Guinea Creole).
These elements could have been easily found in Rougé (2004). 

This example is representative of the approach defended in this book, which
deliberately plays down the influence of Portuguese on LI, as can be read on
page 96, talking about tones: ''Come considero que o lung'Ie provém do
proto-crioulo do Golfo da Guiné, e não do Português, esta seção não nos será
relevante'' (My translation: Since I consider that LI comes from the
Proto-Creole of the Gulf of Guinea, but not from Portuguese, this section
won't be relevant to the discussion). This argument, repeated many times in
the book is a little short since the author never details what this
proto-creole is and how it is so different from Portuguese. This reveals one
real weakness of this book: the absence of both a diachronic perspective and a
complete review of the literature on the emergence of the Gulf of Guinea
Creoles. In the same vein, Chapter 4 deals with a crucial matter in
creolistics: the presence/absence of tone in a creole language (see McWhorter
(2011) for instance). While Maurer (2009) provides some well exemplified
arguments for the presence of tone in LI, ALSA argues that LI is not a tonal
language like standard tone languages (p.101), since: 

- there are tonal alternations with only a few disyllabic words 
-  tonal pairs are absent in monosyllabic words 
- the informants do not confirm nor recognize the minimal tonal pairs. 

These remarks are of very high value for creolistics but the author doesn't
take full advantage of the corpus she collected (and which is not available
online). The author admits (p.102) that a precise study on the relationship
between tone and accent is necessary. One can only regret this absence, given
the importance of this subject in creolistics (see Gooden & alii (2009) for
instance). 
Despite these reservations, this book remains interesting and useful as an
important contribution to the phonology of an endangered language. 

References 

Gunther, W. 1973. Das portugiesische Kreolisch der Ilha do Príncipe. Marburger
Studien zur Afrika-und Asienkunde, Serie A Marburg, (2), 1-277. 

Gooden, S., Drayton, K. A., & Beckman, M. 2009. Tone inventories and tune-text
alignments Prosodic variation in 'hybrid' prosodic systems. Studies in
Language, 33(2), 396-436. 

McWhorter, J. H. 2011. Linguistic simplicity and complexity: why do languages
undress? (Vol. 1). Walter de Gruyter.

Maurer, P. 2009. Principense. Grammar, Texts, and Vocabulary of the
Afro-Portuguese Creole of the Island of Príncipe, Gulf of Guinea. London:
Battlebridge. 

Rougé, J. L. 2004. Dictionnaire étymologique des créoles portugais d'Afrique.
Karthala. 

Traill, A., & Ferraz, L. 1981. The interpretation of tone in Principense
Creole. University of California.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Emmanuel Schang is an associate professor in syntax at the University of
Orléans (France). He has published several papers on Saotomense and
Guadeloupean Creoles. He's in charge of the SEEPiCLa (Structure, Emergence and
Evolution of Pidgin and Creole Languages) International Research Group (CNRS).

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