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Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
1 - 20 of 22 results
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Indigenous Language Ecologies framework
Author(s): Denise AngeloAvailable online: 08 March 2024More LessAbstractLinguistic research with Indigenous communities over several decades has shown that Indigenous contact languages have a large presence in the contemporary Indigenous landscapes of Australia, but this is not reflected in an equitable presence in policy or programs. Policy has not taken up or responded to the available language research and recommendations, nor is policy reliably informed by solid government language data. As a response to such issues, the Indigenous Language Ecologies framework has been developed. It is designed as a tool to assist policy makers to see and include the needs of contact language-speaking communities. The simple framework differentiates the main configurations of multilingualism in Indigenous communities in Australia today, comparing and contrasting the typical repertoires of speakers of contact languages, of Englishes and of traditional languages. It is intended to function as a useful heuristic and, as such, represents an example of translational research where specialist linguistic knowledge has been distilled for a non-specialist policy audience. The paper lays out the rationale for, and design of, this language ecologies approach, and its impact on policy and research to date.
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Verb marking and classification of adjectival predicates in creoles
Author(s): Paula PrescodAvailable online: 27 February 2024More Less
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Noun phrases in Kwéyòl Donmnik
Author(s): Joy P. G. PeltierAvailable online: 22 February 2024More LessAbstractThough Creole nominal systems have been intensely researched, in-context, corpus-based examinations are uncommon, and there are Creole languages whose noun phrases remain understudied. I use a corpus of conversational data and a pattern-building task designed to elicit demonstrative and definite noun phrases, exophoric reference, and co-speech pointing gestures to explore the noun phrase in Kwéyòl Donmnik, an endangered, understudied French lexifier Creole. I focus on noun phrases that are bare, marked by the post-nominal determiners definite la ‘the’ or demonstrative sa-la ‘this/that’, or accompanied by the pre-nominal indefinite determiner yon ‘a(n)’. Results pinpoint the readings conveyed by each noun phrase type, identify the word categories of their nouns, and address similarities in usage between definite la and demonstrative sa-la.
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Reported language choice and usage of teenage Mauritians
Author(s): Anu Bissoonauth and Gaetano RandoAvailable online: 12 February 2024More LessAbstractThis article investigates language choice and usage of teenage Mauritians and possible variations due to gender differences. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from our investigation, we analyse language differences in male and female students when interacting with peers, using social media, evaluating language preference and making future plans. The findings reveal that teenage girls are more likely to use trilingual combinations (English, French, Kreol) in everyday interactions with friends and on social media whereas boys tend to favour Kreol predominantly. Respondents’ language attitudes towards English and French were influenced by academic success, opportunities for global mobility and employment. Positive attitudes towards Kreol were associated with its role as the Mauritian native language that allows ease of communication. Quadralingual combinations (English, French, Kreol and an Asian heritage language) were low, but preference for heritage languages was related to one’s cultural and ancestral ties as well as career prospects.
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Source language influences in the Australian mixed language, Light Warlpiri
Author(s): Carmel O’ShannessyAvailable online: 09 February 2024More LessAbstractA mixed language is formed through the systematic combination of subsystems from two source languages ( Bakker 2017 : 219). Defining features include the social history of a language and the ways in which the source language components are distributed in the mixed language, showing significant amounts of lexicon and/or grammar from each source. Yet it is possible for a language of this type to also have identifiable influence from a third language, still showing a dichotomy of source in that the three sources can be categorised into two groups. The Australian mixed language, Light Warlpiri, shows evidence of contributions from Warlpiri, on the one hand, and Kriol and English on the other. Interestingly, the reflexive-reciprocal subsystem of Light Warlpiri shows clear influence of English, in contrast to that of Kriol. Subsystems can each operate somewhat independently of other subsystems in terms of which sources they draw on and how they do so.
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After 1788 *
Author(s): Jane SimpsonAvailable online: 06 February 2024More LessAbstractContemporary contact languages used by Indigenous people in Australia share many words and grammatical features and structures. I trace the development of contact varieties in Australia between 1788 to 1848, arguing that their similarities arise from the dominance of English-speakers among the invaders, their ways of talking to people who did not speak English fluently, the transfer of people between penal settlements, and the fact that sea traffic was the fastest form of travel between colonies. Evidence for zones of influence in which particular features appear is drawn from geographic distribution and time of first attestation. I use four types of reports for locating features: outsiders’ reports of direct speech by Aborigines and of outsiders’ speech to Aborigines, imitations by outsiders of Aboriginal speech, and outsiders’ comments on Aboriginal speech. Another kind of evidence comes from the adoption of contact variety words into Aboriginal languages. This is illustrated with a case study of words for ‘white woman’ in Aboriginal languages.
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Remarks on the syntax of bare nouns in Papiamentu
Author(s): Luis López, Rodi Laanen, Charlotte Pouw and M. Carmen Parafita CoutoAvailable online: 19 January 2024More LessAbstractThis article presents an argument that bare (singular) nouns in Papiamentu include additional silent functional structure, as proposed in Kester and Schmitt (2007) . The argument is based on Dutch-Papiamentu code-switched noun phrases and exploits the crucial datum that a Dutch bare noun is grammatical when inserted in a Papiamentu sentence, although bare nouns are ungrammatical in a Dutch unilingual sentence. We propose that this datum can be accounted for if the Dutch bare noun is the complement of a silent Papiamentu category, D or Num. The locus of cross-linguistic variation that yields the (un)acceptability of bare nouns is a property in D or Num.
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Pacific transformations of the ‘Country of Babel’
Author(s): Christoph NeuenschwanderAvailable online: 18 January 2024More LessAbstractThe story of Babel has been used for centuries to prompt negative evaluations of linguistic diversity. It has been instrumentalised in debates about English, to attest linguistic purity and propagate the standard variety. In (post)colonial discourses, Babel came to project imperialist language ideologies and hierarchies onto new contexts. This paper demonstrates how Babel, as a recurring theme in debates on Hawai‘i Creole and Tok Pisin, has undergone transformation, having been employed in seemingly contradictory ways, variably used to legitimise or delegitimise the creoles. These competing, diametrically opposed lines of argumentation reflect different concepts of community and nation. Yet, as I propose here, Babel remains consistent in its core function: It serves as a topos, invoking ostensibly common knowledge about the dangers of (unmonitored) linguistic heterogenisation. Thus, regardless of its ideological force to challenge or maintain the (post)colonial status quo, it perpetuates a basic imperialist understanding of the nation as monolingual.
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‘It runs in the family’
Author(s): Raan-Hann Tan and Silvio Moreira De SousaAvailable online: 11 January 2024More LessAbstractThe reconstruction of the kinship terminology of the now-extinct Tugu Creole Portuguese (TCP) results from the triangulation between TCP’s available kinship terminology, the complete mapping for Malacca Creole Portuguese (MCP), and the terminology used currently by the Tugu community, which experienced a language shift towards Indonesian Malay and Betawi Malay. By examining the Tugu Village community in Jakarta, Indonesia, this paper adds more evidence for the existence of parallel kinship structures within one community and establishes linguistic and anthropological evidence for markers of inclusion and distinction among Jakarta’s ethnic groups. Thus, the Malay variety spoken in Tugu (TuM) possesses sociohistorical and linguistic elements that distinguish the community from other local communities, together with elements that bind the community to other Asian-Portuguese creole communities.
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The early Baba Malay continuum
Author(s): Nala H. LeeAvailable online: 19 December 2023More LessAbstractBaba Malay today is an endangered creole perceived to be a less flexible, easily identifiable language entity with static ascribed qualities. An investigation of resources from the late 1800s and early 1900s shows that such a characterization of early Baba Malay is not possible. Three novels and twenty letters demonstrate a wide range of variation, lexically and grammatically, emphasizing a wide creole continuum that plausibly existed in the heydays of the language. The wide range of variation can be understood to be detracting from, and aligning with the creole’s substrate and lexifier languages, or with the language that was gaining dominance during that time, English. The linguistic ideologies of early Baba Malay speakers and competing pressures in their group identities explain the considerable variation found.
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Event plurality and the verbal suffix ‑(a)bad in Australian Kriol
Author(s): Connor Brown and Maïa PonsonnetAvailable online: 14 December 2023More LessAbstractThe verbal suffix ‑(a)bad is a frequent form in Australian Kriol and is well attested across all described varieties of the language. Despite the prevalence of this suffix, its precise semantics have so far gone undescribed in the literature. In this article, we present a semantic analysis of this suffix, drawing on data from a variety of Kriol spoken in the north-east Kimberley region of Western Australia. We argue that the diverse set of readings associated with ‑(a)bad can be best unified under an analysis of this form as a marker of verbal plurality (i.e. pluractionality). The suffix derives a set of plural events from a modified verb stem, which then interacts with aspect and argument structure to produce a wide range of readings, particularly readings of temporal, participant, and spatial plurality.
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Alyawarr English
Author(s): Sally DixonAvailable online: 11 December 2023More LessAbstractThis paper explores Alyawarr English, a new contact language spoken in Ipmangker, a remote Alyawarr community of Central Australia. Focusing on language use by children and drawing on a corpus of 50+ hrs of naturalistic video recordings, several aspects of Alyawarr English are examined in detail. The analysis centres on the origins of nominal and verbal morphology, with comparison to the patterns of replication evidenced in other new Australian contact languages. This reveals that children’s Alyawarr English has several points of symmetry with these languages. Nominal inflectional morphology is primarily derived from Alyawarr sources. Verb morphology is primarily derived from Kriol/English sources. The lexicon is derived from both Kriol/English and Alyawarr sources. Variation between morphology of Alyawarr and Kriol/English sources is also considered in each domain, to further elucidate what gets replicated and why in the ongoing development of new Australian contact languages.
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Predicting the development of Papiamento and Dutch word decoding efficiency in the Dutch Caribbean
Author(s): Melissa van der Elst-Koeiman, Eliane Segers, Ronald Severing and Ludo VerhoevenAvailable online: 01 December 2023More LessAbstractWe 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.
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Recognising Yarrie Lingo, the creole language of Yarrabah community in far north-eastern Queensland Australia
Author(s): Bernadine Yeatman and Denise AngeloAvailable online: 20 November 2023More LessAbstractYarrie Lingo is the local name for the English-lexified creole language spoken in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah in far north-eastern Queensland, Australia. This creole has only recently been gaining recognition but it is the main language of everyday interactions in Yarrabah. This study describes the recognitional trajectory of Yarrie Lingo and what has fostered this language awareness. With a focus on the experiences of the local Aboriginal educator, language activist and researcher, Bernadine Yeatman, we showcase a range of grounded methodologies, including devices like language posters, interviews and illustrative stories, along with maps, timelines and cartoons developed in conjunction with a linguist, Denise Angelo. This shines a light onto the practical ‘how to’ of language awareness for under-recognised language communities and the potential support a linguist can provide. It exemplifies a research approach which engages linguistic knowledge with local language expertise to co-design materials for community members, educators and service providers.
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Adjective phrase fronting in the Malacca Creole Portuguese noun phrase
Author(s): Alan N BaxterAvailable online: 16 October 2023More LessAbstractThis 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.
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On the etymology and distribution of verb forms in Arabic-based pidgins
Author(s): Imed LouhichiAvailable online: 03 October 2023More LessAbstractIn this paper, we add to the body of existing literature on Arabic-based pidgins. We focus on the verbal system because the structure of this phrasal category and how it is used in discourse remain inconclusive. For instance, while some claim these speakers prefer the imperfective form which is marked for male third person singular (e.g. y-iji ‘3sg.m-come.ipf’), others claim it is the imperative that is most preferred (e.g. rūh ‘2.sg.m-go.imp’). Equally, while some argue the choice between either verb forms is pragmatically motivated, others claim it is phonologically motivated. To add to this mix, a third group claims there is a systematic division of labor in that non-state verbs usually follow the prefixed type while the state verbs follow the unprefixed type.
We evaluate these proposals. Analysis of ‘frog story’ narratives by 10 GPA speakers in the United Arab Emirates reveal the prefixed form to be the most preferred and this preference is influenced by the contriving of phonological, semantic, and pragmatic factors. Frequency as well as item-based analogy as understood within usage-based theories of learning provide a viable framework in which the apparent inconsistencies between the competing proposals are resolved.
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What can the stories of a frog tell us about motion event description in Gulf Pidgin Arabic?
Author(s): Imed LouhichiAvailable online: 02 October 2023More LessAbstractMotion event description has received little attention in contact linguistics as compared to other branches of linguistics. To address this gap, I provide an overview of the grammatical and lexical resources for the encoding of motion events in Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA). 10 GPA speakers narrated the story of a boy, his dog, and his missing pet frog. The results revealed: (a) the participants used a relatively large number of path verbs and a comprehensive number of spatial particles; (b) they showed an overwhelming aversion to the description of manner in boundary-crossing and caused motion situations; and (c) they engineered coercive constructions to deal with semantically complex situations. Taken together, the linguistic evidence suggests GPA is developing into a verb-framed language type. This study adds a significant methodological and empirical weight to the existing literature and has the potential to encourage intra- and inter-disciplinary comparative work on motion event description.
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Empiricism against imperialism
Author(s): Peter BakkerAvailable online: 17 August 2023More LessAbstractLarge 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.
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A multidimensional perspective on the acquisition of subject-verb dependencies by Haitian-Creole speaking children
Available online: 17 August 2023More LessAbstractThe 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.
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Reciprocal constructions
Author(s): Kofi YakpoAvailable online: 14 August 2023More LessAbstractThis study analyzes the borrowing of Dutch reciprocal pronouns in a corpus of primary field data of Sranan, Sarnami, and Surinamese Javanese, three languages of Suriname. The expression of reciprocity in relevant African and Asian substrates of the languages under study is also presented and discussed. I suggest cognitive and sociolinguistic explanations for the preference of Dutch-sourced reciprocal pronouns during multilingual contact. The three languages show convergent borrowing processes favoring the dedicated Dutch reciprocal pronoun over ‘scattered’ native strategies. Further, Suriname is a hierarchical post-colonial language ecology in which borrowing proceeds mostly in one direction, either directly from Dutch, or from Dutch via Sranan. The parallel multilingual trajectory of contact-induced change in the expression of a complex notion like reciprocity showcases the attractiveness for borrowing of forms and structures with transparent relations between form and content.
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Intonation in Palenquero
Author(s): José Ignacio Hualde and Armin Schwegler
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Off Target?
Author(s): Philip Baker
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The Origins of Fanagalo
Author(s): Rajend Mesthrie
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Relexification
Author(s): Derek Bickerton
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