Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 40, Issue 1, 2025

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the grammar and origins of a focusing rule in Malacca Creole Portuguese, (MCP) whereby an adjectival phrase (AdjP) may be extracted from the right branch of a noun phrase and fronted to a position prior to the determiner. It begins by describing the characteristics of AdjP-fronting in MCP, according to determiner type, syntactic role of the fronted adjective, syntactic role of the determiner phrase, and the structural complexity of the AdjP. Subsequently, it considers the presence of AdjP-fronting in 19th and 20th century data of the Creole Portuguese of Tugu/Batavia, Mangalore, Cannanore, Cochin and Sri Lanka. Building on these comparisons, it then addresses the potential influences of Dravidian (Malayalam, Tamil) and Indo-Aryan (Bangla) substrates, and Dutch and English adstrates. The paper concludes that AdjP-fronting in MCP may be added to the list of typological features that demonstrate the connection between the southern Indo-Portuguese creoles and the Malayo-Portuguese creoles.

Abstract

The present multidimensional study investigates the acquisition of pronominal subject-verb dependencies in Standard Haitian Creole (HC). A corpus analysis confirms that HC subject pronouns are phonological clitics in the target grammar and that their reduction is optional and unpredictable. The comprehension and production of dependencies involving these subject pronouns in 20 preschoolers acquiring HC as their first language were investigated. While the production of third person singular and plural subject pronouns l(i) and y(o) reveals early mastery of adult constraints on their phonological reductions, the systematic assignments of l(i) to singular subjects vs. y(o) to plural subjects of the verb in the syntactic dependency emerge later, in both production and comprehension. The few syntactic contexts in which HC-learning children show evidence of comprehension involve full forms, rather than phonological reductions. Possible factors that explain these findings include the relative unpredictability of their forms and the linguistic status of HC pronouns.

Abstract

Large scale typological studies have been criticized for being unscientific, biased, methodologically unsound and as perpetrating neocolonial attitudes. Meakins (2022) echoes these views in her first JPCL column. The conclusions of all studies using large typological datasets, however, point in the direction that creoles do have structural properties that distinguish them from their lexifiers and the languages of the world, including a dozen not mentioned in Meakins’ column. Opponents use data that are a factor of thousand less extensive, yet apparently more credible. Creoles developed in adverse circumstances, and the flexibility of human genius led to new structural properties, apparently shared across the world. The opposite view, that creoles are continuations of their lexifiers, runs the risk of justifying colonialism, as if forced deportation, blackbirding, slavery, imperialism and colonialism could not have had catastrophic consequences for the continuation of languages. Devastating sociohistorical circumstances led to the creation of new societies, and human ingenuity created their fully-fledged natural languages.

Abstract

We investigated the development of word decoding (Grades 4–6; 165 children) in Papiamento (L1) and Dutch (L2) in the postcolonial context of the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. The results show a steady development over the upper Grades for both L1 Papiamento and L2 Dutch word decoding in that children became more efficient in word decoding over the years. However, the children were generally better decoders in L2 Dutch than in L1 Papiamento. Moreover, the initial language of decoding instruction did not matter for the development of word decoding. The groups were equally efficient in L1 and L2 word decoding in Grades 4–6. Furthermore, rapid naming and phonological awareness predicted L1 word decoding development, whereas rapid naming, phonological awareness, and working memory predicted L2 word decoding development. Finally, evidence was found for linguistic interdependencies for word decoding development from L1 to L2 and vice versa.

Abstract

The heightened scholarly attention given to the absence of articles in creoles since the 1990s leaves an impression of a linguistic particularism. But are articleless nouns in English-related creoles so peculiar? If bare nouns are characteristic of creoles, their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic behaviour are not wholly unexpected, given the relatively small number of mismatches observed in the comparative data I provide in this column. A comparative view of textual corpora extracted from translations of Le Petit Prince in Jamaican, Vincentian and English shows compelling grammatical affinities between the three languages. Apart from a minimal number of innovations, bare nouns in the creoles function very much like English bare nominals. I illustrate these affinities using the semantico-pragmatic notions of presupposed identifiability and contextual salience, which facilitate the interpretation of bare nouns.

This article reviews Petit guide de créole martiniquais978-2-37924-422-3