Silvia Kouwenberg

From OV to VO linguistic negotiation in the development of Berbice Dutch creole

Abstract Berbice Dutch Creole combines left-headedness and SVO order with features which are a-typical of Caribbean creoles, such as sentence-final negation, postpositional structures, and aspectual suffixation. The order of constituents in the sentence and in other structures is an issue which has not received much attention in the study of Caribbean creole languages, presumably because there is no conflict between basic constituent order in the English-, French-, Spanish- and Portuguese-related creoles and their lexifiers. Such a conflict exists between Dutch and the Dutch- related creoles Negerhollands (of the US Virgin Islands; extinct), Skepi Dutch (of the Essequibo River area in Guyana; extinct), and Berbice Dutch Creole (of the Berbice River area in Guyana; nearly extinct): whereas SOV order underlines Dutch utterances, Dutch-related creoles invariably display SVO order (Bruyn and Veenstra in press). This article aims at reconstructing some of the developments which resulted in the combination of features displayed by Berbice Dutch Creole through a reconstruction of the choices available in the initial contact situation. Evidence from vocabulary, morphology, and syntax shows that these can best be accounted for as a linguistic compromise between two languages in contact, Dutch and Eastern-Ijo. It must provides strong support for the relevance of Thomason and Kaufmans (1998) process of creole formation out of a crystallized pidgin formed through linguistic negotiation, a process which involves the exploitation of perceived similarities between the languages in contact. This has resulted in the continuity of properties which may be related to surface orderings for similar processes in the development of other Caribbean creole languages, calls the legitimacy of generalizations over processes of creole formation into question.

The Iconic Interpretations of Reduplication: Issues in the Study of Reduplication in Caribbean Creole Languages

The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which the iconic principle, that ‘more of the same form’ corresponds to ‘more of the same meaning’, is evidenced in reduplications in various Caribbean Creoles (including English-, Spanish-, Dutch-, and French-lexifier Creoles).1 We will demonstrate that the form/meaning relationship is not a simple one, but requires a finegrained analysis that considers the inherent semantic properties of the base, and allows for language-specific instantiations, which may display considerable departure from a transparent form/meaning relationship. Reduplication refers to a morphological relation between a base and a derived form which involves the repetition of all or part of the base. Where all of the base is repeated, we speak of whole-word reduplication; where only part of the base surfaces in the reduplicant, it is referred to as partial. Reduplication is considered one of the hallmarks of Creole morphology, along with morphological conversion and compounding.2

Andreas Ammann & Aina Urdze, Wiederholung, Parallelismus, Reduplikation: Strategien der multiplen Strukturanwendung; Enoch Aboh, Norval Smith & Anne Zribi-Hertz (eds.), The morphosyntax of reiteration in creole and non-creole languages

Abstract

Thomas Stolz, Cornelia Stroh & Aina Urdze, Total reduplication: The areal linguistics of a potential universal

Abstract