The Origin and Originality of Passivization in Papiamentu

Diachronica, 2009

This paper deals with the linguistic and historical relationships between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea Creole as spoken on the Santiago island of Cape Verde and in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance. In the linguistic section, the hypothesis that Papiamentu is a relexified offshoot of an early Upper Guinea Creole variety is lent support by focusing on the structural correspondences of the function words in five grammatical categories (pronouns, question words, prepositions, conjunctions and reciprocity and reflexivity). In addition, salient data from several early (18th and 19th century) Papiamentu texts is presented. The historical section provides a framework that accounts for the linguistic transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao in the second half of the 17th century.

Papia Revista Brasileira De Estudos Crioulos E Similares, 2008

Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives on Contact Languages, Creole Language Library 32, 2007

In this chapter, it is demonstrated that although the Tense, Modality, and Aspect (TMA) system of Papiamentu has been cited by a number of researchers (Andersen 1993; Bickerton 1980, 1981) both as being exceptional in relation to other Creoles of the Caribbean and as being deviant from universal strategies for marking TMA attributed by some to Creole languages worldwide, Papiamentu TMA operates essentially on the basis of the same system found in most Atlantic Creoles as well as in most of their West African substrate languages. All of the features which Andersen (1993: 89–91) and others cite as ‘aberrant’ in Papiamentu, including: (1) the near obligatory use of the markers a or ta before verbs; (2) the absence of a ‘Ø marker’ for perfective aspect; (3) the existence of two irrealis markers (lo and Ø) and the ‘deviant position’ of lo; (4) the dual (tense and aspect) function of the marker tabata; and (5) the lack of a specifi c morpheme that functions exclusively as an anterior marker; are all shown to be the result of features and patterns of grammatical change found throughout the Afro-Atlantic.

2009

Until recently, most creolists assumed that an inherent part of restructuring was the loss of any inflectional morphemes from the lexical donor language in any pidgin or creole resulting from contact. However, this characterization of restructuring is no longer tenable given recent evidence (Clements 1996, Bakker 2002) that not all inflections in pidgin and creole languages can be credibly attributed to recent contact with the superstrate and must, therefore, have existed since the languages' genesis. What this implies is no less than a paradigm shift in creole linguistics (Holm 2005). This paper examines in detail a number of nineteenth-century grammars and texts of two closely related Portuguese-based creoles, those of Guiné-Bissau (GBC) and Cape Verde (CVC). It focuses on attestations of inflections in both the noun phrase and the verb phrase, comparing them with modern descriptions of these languages. The aim is to critically evaluate the reliability of these older works, which have sometimes been dismissed out of hand by later researchers when the data they reported did not conform to current theory. The purpose of this paper is to assess what light these older works might cast on issues such as when the acrolect emerged and what relation (if any) its emergence had to decreolization.

2002

This paper is concerned with the linguistic ties between Papiamentu and the Upper Guinea branch of Portuguese-based Creole as spoken on the Santiago island of Cape Verde (SCV) and in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance (GBC)3. The aim is to underpin the claim that these creoles have common origins by diachronically analyzing and comparing aspects of their core morphology.

Papia Revista Brasileira De Estudos Crioulos E Similares, 2014

Diachronica, 2009

This paper deals with the linguistic and historical relationships between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea Creole as spoken on the Santiago island of Cape Verde and in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance. In the linguistic section, the hypothesis that Papiamentu is a relexified offshoot of an early Upper Guinea Creole variety is lent support by focusing on the structural correspondences of the function words in five grammatical categories (pronouns, question words, prepositions, conjunctions and reciprocity and reflexivity). In addition, salient data from several early (18th and 19th century) Papiamentu texts is presented. The historical section provides a framework that accounts for the linguistic transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao in the second half of the 17th century.

2015

This article focuses on Santiaguense Capeverdean words derived from Portuguese non-infinitive verbal forms and among these, more specifically on those elements which were not recently borrowed from modern Portuguese and do not compete with Capeverdean more basilectal items. In section 1, the category of Capeverdean words under scrutiny is defined contrastively with other similar types of words. In section 2, all known members of this category are examined in turn and according to the characteristics of their respective Portuguese sources. In section 3, a comparative approach is developed, in which the etymological counterparts of the Capeverdean words presented in the previous sections are systematically investigated for other Upper Guinea Creoles (i.e. Guinea-Bissau Creole, Casamance Creole and Papiamentu). The conclusion section stresses the main points of interest of this study, namely (i) the methodology used herein, which combines historical and comparative linguistics, (ii) the centrality of imperative forms as an input for new lexical verb roots in Upper Guinea Creoles and more generally in situations of language acquisition, and (iii) the scientific prospects that a comparison covering a wider sample of Ibero-Romance-based Creoles could offer concerning words derived from Portuguese non-infinitive verbal forms in these languages. Keywords: Capeverdean; Upper Guinea Creoles; Historical Linguistics; Portuguese.