Stefan Pfänder

French Guianese Creole

This article hypothesizes that French Guianese Creole (fgc) had a markedly different formative period compared to other French lexifier creoles, a linguistically diverse slave population with a strong Bantu component and, in the French Caribbean, much lower or no Arawak and Portuguese linguistic influence.The historical and linguistic description of the early years of fgc shows, though, that the founder population of fgc was dominated numerically and socially by speakers of Gbe languages, and had almost no speakers of Bantu languages. Furthermore, speakers of Arawak pidgin and Portuguese were both present when the colony began in Cayenne.

Linguistics: Inheritance and Innovation in French Guianese Creole

This chapter focuses on language-users rather than grammars as it explores how features move across languages. This usage-based framework sets out different mechanisms of language transfer such as functionalisation and then applies them to contact languages, using French Guianese Creole as a test case. Taking the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures as a model, this chapter compares key parts of the noun phrase, the verb phrase and sentence structure in French Guianese Creole and in Gbe languages spoken in the African region of origin of the first slaves. It finds strong evidence of Gbe origins in the creole that can be explained by the mechanisms of language transfer.

History: The Creation of French Guianese Creole

This chapter describes the history of French Guiana during the time when French Guianese Creole emerged (1660–1700). After providing background information about the Native American, French and African peoples who lived in French Guiana, this chapter explores the French Caribbean colonial system founded in the Antilles. It then focuses on the linguistic experience of African slaves in French Guiana’s capital Cayenne, drawing on a plantation archive to describe daily life in the colony and providing evidence that, unusually for a slave colony, almost all the first slaves came from a single region of Africa. This chapter also provides a likely pathway for the invention of French Guianese Creole as it evolved from basic pidgin to the dominant language of the community.

Introduction: A Dual Approach

The introduction explores the concepts of linguistic innovation and inheritance. It emphasises the goal of this study to remain outside the contentions of current theories of creolisation. Instead, it aims to apply the recent discoveries in linguistics emphasising the perspective of the language user to historical knowledge of French Guianese Creole and to a corpus of recordings of French Guianese Creole.

Resonanz und Interaktion: Eine philosophische Annäherung anhand zweier Proben

Der Aufsatz beleuchtet das Phänomen und die Begrifflichkeit der Resonanz anhand unterschiedlicher Formen der Interaktion. Nach einer ideengeschichtlichen und metaphorologischen Situierung des Resonanzkonzepts werden einige grundlegende Differenzierungen eingeführt, die dazu beitragen, die Vielfalt der Erscheinungsformen und Effekte von Resonanz zu ordnen. Anschließend wird insbesondere die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Aktivität und Passivität sowie die spezifische Zeitstruktur von Resonanzerfahrungen mittels zweier Proben behandelt: Als erstes Beispielszenario dient das gemeinsame Musizieren, als zweites das gemeinsame Schweigen im Kontext der Psychotherapie.