Diachronica - Volume 26, Issue 3, 2009

This paper deals with the evolution of certain subordinating constructions in Hup, a Nadahup (Makú) language of the northwest Amazon. Internal reconstruction, informed by close resemblances among synchronically attested clause types, suggests that Hup’s headless relative clause has given rise to a converb construction, a subtype of adverbial in which a dedicated verb form modifies a main clause. This development provides new insight into the origins of converbs and sheds light on the crosslinguistically common resemblance between relative and adverbial constructions more generally. Additionally, the Hup converbal clause has itself developed a main clause function, and the subordinating morphology employed by the relative and converb constructions is associated with topicalization. The transitions undergone by these structures in Hup contribute to our understanding of the diachronic pathways that may be taken by clauses once they have attained syntactic complexity.

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.

The Afro-descendents of Panama’s Caribbean coast maintain the tradition of the Negros Congos, a series of folkloric manifestations occurring during Carnival season, and including a special cryptolect based loosely on Spanish. According to oral tradition, Congo speech was devised among captive and maroon Africans in colonial Panama as a means of hiding their speech from their colonial masters. Widely felt — both by Congo participants and by outside observers — to consist only of deliberate deformations of Spanish words and semantic inversions, Congo speech in reality also contains numerous elements traceable to Afro-Hispanic communities in other former Spanish-American colonies. Data drawn from twenty-four Congo communities demonstrate systematic regional variation — phonetic and lexical — that verifies the status of Congo speech as a cryptolect undergoing natural language evolution. These data also contribute to the search for the geographical locus of the original Congo dialect.

The existence of a connection between the loss of case inflection and the emergence of overt definiteness in Bulgarian can be supported with arguments of various weight. Among them are: (i) The comparison with parallel developments in Germanic and Romance, (ii) the ability of articles to perpetuate case distinctions after case marking on nouns and adjectives has been obliterated, (iii) their capacity to take over functions formerly performed by case, (iv) the participation of both processes in the analyticity-syntheticity cycle, (v) their involvement in the pendulum between hypo- and hyper-determination, and (vi) the parallel sequence of their implementation among noun classes defined by animacy, gender and number. I argue that the similarities of implementation between the two diachronic processes should be explained in terms of three interrelated variables: markedness, perceptual salience and frequency. The conclusions reached fit in with the predictions of the Usage-Based Model of Change espoused by Bybee and Phillips and those of Andersen’s Markedness Theory of Linguistic Change and show the potential of these models for the analysis of the core issues of the Balkan Sprachbund.