Author: Marlyse Baptista Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9789027252531 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 520
Book Description
This volume offers a thorough examination of the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse properties of noun phrases in a wide variety of creole (and non-creole) languages including Cape Verdean Creole, Santome, Papiamentu, Guinea-Bissau Creole, Mindanao Chabacano, Réunionnais Creole, Lesser Antillean, Haitian Creole, Mauritian Creole, Seychellois, Sranan, Jamaican Creole, Berbice Dutch Creole and African American English. Comparative studies also consider the determiner systems of Middle and Modern French, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Ewe, Fon and Gun. This compilation of 16 chapters brings together descriptive, theoretical, diachronic and synchronic studies that focus on the structure and interpretation of bare nouns in creoles. The contributions demonstrate the variety and complex nature of determiner systems in creoles and their widespread use of bare nouns in comparison to their source languages. This volume is evidence of the relevance of creole languages to theories of language creation, language change and linguistic theory in general.
Author: Petra Sleeman Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027287295 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
One of the recurrent questions in historical linguistics is to what extent languages can borrow grammar from other languages. It seems for instance hardly likely that each 'average European' language developed a definite article all by itself, without any influence from neighbouring languages. It is, on the other hand, by no means clear what exactly was borrowed, since the way in which definiteness is expressed differs greatly among the various Germanic and Romance languages and dialects. One of the main aims of this volume is to shed some light on the question of what is similar and what is different in the structure of the noun phrase of the various Romance and Germanic languages and dialects, and what causes this similarity or difference.
Author: Susanne Maria Michaelis Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199691398 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 572
Book Description
The Atlas presents commentaries and colour maps showing how 130 linguistic features - phonological, syntactic, morphological, and lexical - are distributed among the world's pidgins and creoles. Designed and written by the world's leading experts, it is a unique resource of outstanding value for linguists of all persuasions throughout the world.
Author: Enoch Oladé Aboh Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027252572 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 421
Book Description
In recent years, there has been a new interest in evaluating complex structures in languages. The implications of such studies are varied, e.g., the distinction between supposedly more complex and less complex languages, how complexity relates to human knowledge of language, and the role of the reduction or increase of complexity in language change and creolization. This book focuses on the latter issue, but the conclusions presented here hold of typological complexity in general. The chapters in this book show that the notion of complexity as conceived of in linguistics mainly centres on the outer manifestations of language (e.g., numbers of affixes). This exercise is useful in establishing the patterning of languages in terms of their degrees of analyticity or synthesis, but it fails to address the properties of the inner rules of these grammars, and how these relate to the computational system that governs the human language capacity. Put simply, issues of complexity should not be equated with the complexity observed in surface patterns of grammars alone."
Author: Diana Guillemin Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027252602 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
Within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalism and Formal Semantics, this work documents the development of the Mauritian Creole (MC) determiner system from the mid 18th century to the present. Guillemin proposes that the loss of the French quantificational determiners, which agglutinated to nouns, resulted in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions. This triggered a shift in noun denotation, from predicative in French to argumental in MC, and accounts for the very different determiner systems of the creole and its lexifier. MC nouns are lexically stored as Kind denoting terms, that share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals. New MC determiners are analyzed as 'type shifting operators' that shift Kinds into predicates, and serve to establish the referential properties of noun phrases. The analysis provides evidence for the universality of semantic features like Definiteness and Specificity, and the mapping of their form and function.
Author: Glenn Gilbert Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824882156 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 637
Book Description
This book is for the memory of John E. Reinecke, a man whose humanistic activism and sharp-hewn scholarship helped to shape the scientific study of pidgin and creole languages throughout much of the twentieth century. Reinecke was both a social reformer and a leading sociolinguistic researcher working with creole languages and societies that derive from diverse groups of people thrown into close social contact. Most notably, Reinecke's keen sense of social justice has had a telling effect on the social history of Hawaii. Along with his persistent efforts to obtain a fair and equal share for wage earners in sharply stratified societies, his attention early became focused on their language. By encouraging others to study what he called "marginal languages," he was able to bring to them (and to the extraordinary issues—theoretical and practical—which they raise) a measure of prestige, both in the eyes of their speakers and in the increased attention accorded them by students of language and society. The book presents a description of Reinecke's life and work, the text of his own last paper on creolistics, and seventeen papers which reflect the range and vitality of the field that he did so much to open. Some of the papers reflect the issue which has come to dominate creole studies—the debate over the role of universals and of specific substrata as competing explanations of the amazing similarities that creoles, and perhaps pidgins also, exhibit across the world. Many describe the intense language contact within which language contraction and expansion occur (they do this either directly, or by supplying new data which will eventually feed such descriptions), and and some are our belated response to calls which Reinecke made in the 1930s. Fifty years ago, he saw the need for the kind of comparative studies which are only now under way—in, for example, Hazel Carter's paper, which represents a pioneering attempt to compare the suprasegmentals of English-based Creoles on both sides of the Atlantic. In his last years, Reinecke strongly supported research on contact languages with non-European lexical bases. He thought this was the area from which future creole studies would derive the greatest theoretical and practical gain, and in this volume six papers answer his call by analyzing such pidgins and creoles.
Author: Claire Lefebvre Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027206767 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 641
Book Description
Since creole languages draw their properties from both their substrate and superstrate sources, the typological classification of creoles has long been a major issue for creolists, typologists, and linguists in general. Several contradictory proposals have been put forward in the literature. For example, creole languages typologically pair with their superstrate languages (Chaudenson 2003), with their substrate languages (Lefebvre 1998), or even, creole languages are alike (Bickerton 1984) such that they constitute a definable typological class (McWhorter 1998). This book contains 25 chapters bearing on detailed comparisons of some 30 creoles and their substrate languages. As the substrate languages of these creoles are typologically different, the detailed investigation of substrate features in the creoles leads to a particular answer to the question of how creoles should be classified typologically. The bulk of the data show that creoles reproduce the typological features of their substrate languages. This argues that creoles cannot be claimed to constitute a definable typological class."
Author: Viveka Velupillai Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN: 9027268843 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 629
Book Description
This lucid and theory-neutral introduction to the study of pidgins, creoles and mixed languages covers both theoretical and empirical issues pertinent to the field of contact linguistics. Part I presents the theoretical background, with chapters devoted to the definition of terms, the sociohistorical settings, theories on the genesis of pidgins and creoles, as well as discussions on language variation and the sociology of language. Part II empirically tests assumptions made about the linguistic characteristics of pidgins and creoles by systematically comparing them with other natural languages in all linguistic domains. This is the first introduction that consistently applies the findings of the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures and systematically includes extended pidgins and mixed languages in the discussion of each linguistic feature. The book is designed for students of courses with a focus on pidgins, creoles and mixed languages, as well as typologically oriented courses on contact linguistics.
Author: Tsuyoshi Ono Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN: 9027261512 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
The ‘NP’ is one of the least controversial grammatical units that linguists work with. The NP is often assumed to be universal, and appears to be robust cross-linguistically (compared to ‘VP’ or even ‘clause’) in that it can be manipulated in argument positions in constructed examples. Furthermore, for any given language, its internal structure (order and type of modifiers) tends to be relatively fixed. Surprisingly, however, the empirical basis for ‘NP’ has never been established. The chapters in this volume examine the NP in everyday interactions from diverse languages, including little-studied languages as well as better-researched ones, in a variety of interactional settings. Together, these chapters show that cross-linguistically, the category NP is not as robust as has been assumed: in the context of temporally unfolding human interaction, its structural status is constantly negotiated in terms of participants’ evolving social agendas.
Author: Susanne Maria Michaelis Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199691401 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 325
Book Description
The most authoritative guide ever published to the world's pidgin and creole languages. The 3-volume Survey describes their histories and linguistic characteristics. The Atlas of Pidgins and Creoles, published at the same time, shows how 130 linguistic features are distributed among the world's languages.
Author: Marlyse Baptista
Author: Petra Sleeman
Author: Susanne Maria Michaelis
Author: Enoch Oladé Aboh
Author: Diana Guillemin
Author: Glenn Gilbert
Author: Claire Lefebvre
Author: Viveka Velupillai
Author: Tsuyoshi Ono
Author: Susanne Maria Michaelis