Kevin J. Rottet

A Structural Sketch of the Cajun French Spoken in Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes

Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes together constitute a former delta of the Mississippi River known as the Lafourche Basin. Geographically, the area is crossed by a number of bayous, and the Gulf Coast is in fact extensive marshland. Undoubtedly due to the relative geographic isolation of much of the area, the levels of retention of Cajun French (CF) are reported to be higher here than in most other parts of Acadiana (Trepanier, 1989), with retention reaching its highest point in the communities of small-scale fishermen (Larouche, 1979) and among the Houma Indians of the coastal marshes. The Houma Indians, who have inhabited the area since the late 18th century, have embraced in large part the lifestyle and language of their Cajun neighbors, and in some Indian families, the children still receive their primary socialization in French. This is not the case in the vast majority of Cajun families, among whom the language is in serious decline and is no longer the language of homes in which there are young children. Although there are no studies on the CF of the Houma Indians, it is regarded by the community as being the same as or very similar to that of the Cajuns.

Inanimate interrogatives and settlement patterns in Francophone Louisiana

In the light of the extensive dialect leveling found in Francophone Louisiana, the suggestion made in Byers (1988) is a particularly interesting one, that the geographical distribution of qui and quoi , both meaning ‘what’, reflects the differential settlement histories of early 18th century Creoles, and Acadians, respectively. In this article I document these two interrogative patterns as to form and locales of attestation, and I explore the evidence for Byers claim, showing that a strong case can be made by considering not only settlement history but also the interrogatives of Louisiana Creole, the origins of which arguably predate the arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana.

Phrasal verbs and English influence in Welsh

Abstract Phrasal verbs (PVs) are combinations of a verb of movement or action (get, put, make, etc.) plus a directional particle (back, out, in, etc.). Some PVs are transparent (go up, come back) while others are idiomatic (e.g. run up a bill). PVs are often associated with English, but Welsh and its sister Brythonic languages have long made use of literal PVs such as rhedeg i ffwrdd ‘run away’ and dod i mewn ‘come in.’ Yet in Welsh, especially in the last few centuries, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of idiomatic PVs, which often have exact counterparts in English (gwneud i fyny am ‘to make up for’, rhedeg allan o ‘to run out of’). In this article I propose to characterize and illustrate the Welsh PV from Welsh texts and to make some observations about PVs in the other two Brythonic languages. Finally I will examine attitudes of Welsh speakers toward the PV construction as these are manifested in pedagogical materials for Welsh-language instruction and in Welsh dictionaries.

FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES AND VERB MOVEMENT IN LOUISIANA CREOLE

Universal Grammar (UG) has frequently been faulted for its inability to deal with language Variation. There is nonetheless a recent interest in dialect Variation in Romance among many syntacticians working within the UG tradition (see, for example Jaeggli and Safir 1989; Kayne 1991; Bernstein 1991; Reed 1991, for work on French dialects, or Brandi and Cordin 1981; Roberge 1986; and Zanuttini 1991, for Italian dialects). Many creole languages are notorious for their extensive Variation, and therefore they provide a fertiie testing ground for theories of Variation. While some research has been carried out on Haitian Creole in the UG framework (Lefebvre, Magloire-Holly, and Piou 1982; Deprez 1988; Lumsden 1991; Ritter and Lumsden 1989), there have s yet been no attempts that I am aware of to analyze the Variation occurring in a (de)creolizatkyn οοτΛ\η\ναπ\ from a ViG peTspective. In th\s» papei my purpaac \s to addtess one aspect of the Variation in the continuum present in Louisiana French. The specific issue to be examined is the morphosyntactic alternation between f ll and truncated verb stems in mesolectal Louisiana Creole which is absent in basilectal varieties of that language. The Information conveyed in French with bound morphemes is rendered in Louisiana Creole (and other creoles) by free morphemes, making creoles classifiable s isolating languages. I will claim that one of the syntactic correlates of creolization is the elimination of (some) overt movements of lexical categories to functional/inflectional categories. The Louisiana Creole data follow very clearly in that there is no verb movement to

Neology, Competing Authenticities, and the Lexicography of Regional Languages: The Case of Breton

Lexicographic practices when dealing with minoritized regional languages demonstrably differ in certain key respects from such practices with “big” languages like English or French. Prominent among such differences is the treatment of onomasiological gaps, common in small languages of limited currency, including the handling of neologisms and deliberate coinages. Here we propose a case study of Breton, the regional Celtic language of northwestern France, whose sociolinguistic history has divided intellectuals into two camps with competing visions of authenticity: a traditionalist camp focused on the dialectal speech of older, rural native speakers who have long filled lexical gaps by resorting to borrowing from French; and a modernist camp of younger, urban, well educated “Neo-Breton” speakers, whose standardized Breton eschews French lexical influence, looking rather to the Celtic roots of Breton, and even the closely related language Welsh, to fill lexical gaps. In this case study we examine a selection of quasi-technical terms in a corpus of twentieth- and twenty-first-century bilingual Breton lexicography. The study examines the issue of terminological variation attested for such words, their lexicological profile, and the extent to which their lexicographic handling reflects a position with respect to competing notions of authenticity.