Creolization and Contact (Creole Language Library)

Creolization and Contact

Creole Language Library (CLL) A companion series to the “Journal of Pidgin & Creole Languages”

Editors Jacques Arends

John Victor Singler

Amsterdam

New York

Editorial Advisory Board Mervyn Alleyne

Salikoko Mufwene

Kingston, Jamaica

Chicago

Norbert Boretzky

Pieter Muysken

Bochum

Nijmegen

Lawrence Carrington

Peter Mühlhäusler

Trinidad

Adelaide

Glenn Gilbert

Pieter Seuren

Carbondale, Illinois

Nijmegen

George Huttar

Norval Smith

Dallas

Amsterdam

John Holm Coimbra

Volume 23 Creolization and Contact Edited by Norval Smith and Tonjes Veenstra

Creolization and Contact Edited by

Norval Smith University of Amsterdam

Tonjes Veenstra Free University Berlin

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam
/
Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Creolization and Contact / edited by Norval Smith, Tonjes Veenstra. p. cm. (Creole Language Library, issn 0920–9026 ; v. 23) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Creole dialects. 2. Languages in contact. I. Smith, Norval. II. Veenstra, Tonjes, 1962- III. Series. PM7831.C743 2001 417’.22--dc21 isbn 90 272 52459 (Eur.) / 1 58811 1113 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2001043202

© 2001 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Contents

Introduction Norval Smith and Tonjes Veenstra 1. Relexification in creole genesis and its effects on the development of the creole Claire Lefebvre

1

9

2. Voodoo Chile: Differential substrate effects in Saramaccan and Haitian Norval Smith

43

3. Language intertwining: Its depiction in recent literature and its implications for theories of creolisation Anthony P. Grant

81

4. Paralexification in language intertwining Maarten Mous

113

5. Pidginization, creolization and creoloids in Stockholm, Sweden Ulla-Britt Kotsinas

125

6. The origin of creole languages: The perspective of second language learning Pieter C. Muysken 7. Koine formation and creole genesis Jeff Siegel 8. Koineization and creole genesis: Remarks on Jeff Siegel’s contribution Frans Hinskens 9. Convergence and explanations in creole genesis Silvia Kouwenberg 10. Contact-induced language change and Pidgin/Creole genesis Sarah G. Thomason

157 175

199 219 249

vi

Contents

11. Yiddish as a contact language Ellen Prince

263

12. Social stratification and network relations in the formation of Sranan Jacques Arends

291

Index of languages

309

Index of authors

313

Index of subjects

317

Introduction Norval Smith and Tonjes Veenstra

.

Introduction

The idea for the collection of chapters in this book derives originally from a workshop held at the Institute for General Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam in 1995. The Amsterdam Workshop on Language Contact and Creolization was intended to break down some of the artificial barriers that had grown up between researchers in the two fields of Creole Studies and Contact Linguistics. In particular it was the desire of the workshop organizers to invite researchers in various branches of the field of contact linguistics to address the question of what their own particular research agenda had to say about the phenomenon of creolization. Not all the chapters given at that workshop are represented by contributions here, nor were all the articles contained here presented at the workshop. Most workshop articles have since been extensively rewritten, and the original workshop format whereby invited papers were examined in detail by discussants has been abandoned. The theme of this volume is also broader, as is implied by the title Creolization and Contact. Not just contacts between linguistic communities, but contacts between social groups and individuals are considered which may also have had linguistic implications for the formation of the special kind of contact languages represented by creole languages.

. Relexification/Intertwining The first four articles are concerned with the application of the concept of relexification to creole languages. The term intertwined language has been developed to identify those mixed languages that have arisen by processes of relexification. The concept of relexification is not new, deriving as it does from

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Norval Smith and Tonjes Veenstra

the work of Sylvain in the 1930s (Sylvain 1936). She claimed that Haitian was relexified Ewe, that is, an Ewe with the Ewe words replaced by French ones. More recently, and more scientifically, the relevance of relexification has been demonstrated for the field of Mixed Languages by Pieter Muysken (1981). The first article here is also concerned with Haitian. Rather than comparing this language to Ewegbe the language principally used in this comparison is the closely related Fongbe. So, Claire Lefebvre discusses the relexification hypothesis of creole genesis. In addition to the initial process of relexification that takes place in language mixing, she adds two other processes: dialect levelling and reanalysis. Dialect levelling accounts for the homogenity of the ensuing creole, while reanalysis applies to lexical entries created through relexification but assigned a phonologically null representation. She presents analyses of determiners, plural markers and aspect markers in Fongbe, French and Haitan. Relexification accounts for the close parallels between the determiner systems of Haitian and Fongbe, the process of dialect levelling is invoked to explain the not-so-close parallel between Haitian and Fongbe, and reanalysis is used to explain why and how the French adverb après was reanalysed as an aspect marker, and ended up having semantic properties similar to the definite future marker in Fongbe. Norval Smith’s contribution is in part a reaction to one aspect of Lefebvre’s article. He examines the Surinam creole languages, where slaves from the Fongbe-speaking area, or more likely the Eastern Gbe coastal area in general, are assumed to have formed the major component of the early slave imports. If it is correct that Fongbe-speaking slaves formed such an important component in both plantation colonies one would expect to find large-scale parallels in the resultant creole languages. There is certainly a shared feature of post-nominal markers present to some degree in the creoles of both colonies, but there is also a significant difference in what is actually marked postnominally. Smith goes on to examine three other facets of grammar, finding one possible parallel feature, but two other aspects where the results are completely different. Anthony Grant in his contribution provides an up-to-date overview of the literature on language intertwining and discusses the implications it has with respect to creole genesis. He identifies a few factors that set intertwining apart from creolization. First, speakers of intertwined languages are in most cases familiar with the languages which go to make up their new language. This is not always the case with speakers of creoles. Second, the results of the two processes differ, since language intertwining involves the perpetuation of most or all of

Introduction

the structure of a previously existing language, and this includes the perpetuation of morphs and their functions. Creolisation involves the creation (albeit often by use of syntagms and zero morphs rather than by inventing new overt morphs) of a new structure. Although language intertwining does not hold the key to the development of creole languages, he argues that if one could separate out the elements which were there in the early stages of creoles from those which are later accretions, it would not be surprising if there was more evidence of language intertwining in the earlier stages of several modern creoles. Maarten Mous argues that it is the process of paralexification that ultimately leads to language intertwining, which he defines as the process by which parallel word forms for one and the same lexical entry come to exist while sharing semantic and morphological characteristics. He illustrates this process with data from Ma’a, and shows that it plays a decisive role in the creation of not only ordinary mixed languages, but also symbiotic mixed languages, secret languages, slang, ritual languages, taboo languages and mother-in-law languages. The extent to which it can replace the process of relexification as one of the forces in creole genesis is unclear according to him. Although it cannot be ruled out, the relative sparsity of morphology in creole languages prevents us from discovering such evidence.

. Second-language learning Both authors treating the relevance of Second-language learning for creolization agree that there appear to be parallels between the two processes. Starting from her long experience with second-language varieties, Kotsinas finds agreement between the strategies used in second-language varieties and those used in the development of pidgins. Starting from the creole end, Muysken finds similar parallels between certain features of creole languages and strategies used in second-language learning. Ulla-Brit Kotsinas investigates second-language varieties in Sweden with respect to their pidgin/creole features, and compares them to Russenorsk and Gastarbeiterdeutsch. She discusses some apparently deviant features in pidginized varieties of Swedish as used by adult first generation immigrants: repetition, circumlocution, analytic decomposition, lexical over-use and semantic overextension. She argues that these features are not primarily caused by interference from the speakers’ mother tongues, but are, instead, the results of compensatory strategies used by the speakers to fulfil their grammatical and pragmatic

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Norval Smith and Tonjes Veenstra

needs. Furthermore, most of these strategies seem also to be utilized in pidgins, and just as in pidgins they represent the very first steps in an incipient creolization process in the course of which grammatical markers are developed. The crucial question in Pieter Muysken’s contribution is to what extent the grammatical properties of creole languages can plausibly be atttributed to what we know of the processes of L2 acquisition of their lexifier languages. He takes Negerhollands, the Dutch-related creole language of the Virgin Islands as an example, and compares features of this language with what we know of the acquisition of Dutch as a second language. He argues that the following features of Negerhollands may well be explicable as the possible result of the acquisition of Dutch as a second language: the rigid SVO order, the absence of postpositions, pre-verbal negation, the absence of tense and person marking on verbs, periphrastic possessives, the absence of Dutch er forms in Negerhollands, the use of tense/mood/aspect auxiliaries, the absence of inflection on the adjective, the loss of passive morphology in basilectal Negerhollands, and juxtaposed verb + particle combinations. Among the features that are not as easily explicable in terms of second language acquisition are the pronominal system, the semantic features of the TMA system, serial verb constructions, the prepositional system and number marking, of which some at least appear to reflect West-African patterns.

. Koine-formation and convergence Levelling or convergence is a topic that has been much studied in connection with koine-formation in historical linguistics. The first koine was the Greek koine that arose in the dialectally diverse context of Ancient Greek, as a result of wide-ranging political merger. In this volume Siegel and Hinskens discuss the relevance koine-formation might have for theories of creolization. Kouwenberg, however, is very critical of the uncritical use made by many creolists of notions of convergence. After defining the notion koine (and thereby distinguishing it from other language contact varieties) Jeff Siegel discusses the processes involved in koine formation and shows to what extent they may be relevant to pidgin/creole genesis. The three processes are mixing, levelling, and simplification. He sketches the contours of a sociolinguistic model in which basic similarities, differences of degree, as well as essential differences (for example, the role of nativization) between koineization and creole genesis are insightfully ordered

Introduction

relative to each other. He argues that all three processes play a role at different stages of creole genesis. In addition, he argues that in the levelling process substrate reinforcement plays an important role in deciding which of the features will ultimately survive. Frans Hinskens’s contribution, although originally a reaction to it, is more than a thorough review of the main points of Jeff Siegel’s chapter. He discusses Siegel’s findings regarding the relationship between koineization and creole genesis from three angles, viz. conceptual and methodological aspects, the currently occurring processes of levelling and koineization among (traditional) dialects of languages spoken in the Old World, and insights into the approach to koineization in historical linguistics as well as the study of creole languages, language contact and language acquisition. Silvia Kouwenberg critically discusses the notion of convergence which has rapidly gained an enormous popularity among creolists in the last decade. She shows that there is no coherent theory of convergence in historical linguistics, nor is there a unified class of phenomena which go under its label. She concludes that convergence in historical linguistics really characterizes a result, rather than the process that brings about this result, and, as such, is a descriptive rather than explanatory concept. The reverse seems to be true when this concept is applied to creole issues. She distinguishes two senses of the notion in creole studies. It refers either to superficial similarities between languages in contact, or to the similar results of different possible explanations in creole genesis. With respect to the latter sense, she argues that the present desire among creolists to leave all options open and allow for any and all possible factors to contribute to explanations in creole genesis seriously detracts from its validity, and may even mean the return of the Cafetaria Principle. Only in the case when strong hypotheses are available, has the cumulative evidence of converging explanations the potential to strengthen the case for a particular scenario of creole development.

. Contact linguistics Two authors from the field of contact linguistics have contributions here. Thomason approaches the study of the relationships between contact linguistics and creole linguistics from a general comparative perspective, concluding that one kind of language-contact phenomenon is relevant for the study of creolization. Prince approaches matters from the point of view of the contro-

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Norval Smith and Tonjes Veenstra

versial case of Yiddish, concluding that the kind of contact phenomenon found in that language has little to do with creolization, or language mixing, as is often claimed. Sarah Thomason discusses the relationship between types of contact situations and processes of crosslinguistic influence. She distinguishes ‘‘borrowing’’ (that is, the incorporation of features by native speakers into their own language from another language) from ‘‘shift-induced interference’’ (that is, the incorporation of features by non-native speakers into the target language from their native language), and argues that the former does not play an important role in pidgin/creole genesis. It does, however, play a decisive role in language mixture (relexification/language intertwining). With respect to shift-induced interference, she argues that the picture is reversed — that is, unimportant in language mixture, but important in pidgin/creole genesis. Ellen Prince argues that the motivation for the vast majority of contact effects in Yiddish is not an imperfect competence in the Germanic system on the part of the speakers, but a particular semantic or pragmatic intent: to exploit the formal possibilities of Yiddish in order to express in it concepts which were expressed in some different but ‘‘analogous’’ way in the languages present in the contact situation. She rejects out of hand the idea that Yiddish represents some kind of mixture of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic. The idea that Yiddish might be a kind of relexified Sorbian also finds no favour in her eyes. Nor is creolization of relevance.

. The sociolinguistic aspects of contact in creolization In recent years the importance of small-scale factors in some cases of language contact, in particular in the type of language contact involved in creolization, has come to be more and more realized. The size of the European plantation colonies was often (still) very small at the moment of the assumed development of creole languages. In this context it is obviously of great importance to subject the kind of social network that existed on the early plantations to as close an examination as possible. As different languages were spoken by the various participants in such networks, the relevance of this type of examination for a book such as this will be obvious. Jacques Arends’ investigation of sociohistorical factors in creole genesis shows that the stereotypical view of plantations as extremely isolated, strictly bistratal micro-societies to be largely incorrect. He discusses two aspects of the

Introduction

social structure of the plantation system in Surinam: (1) the internal social stratification of the plantation community and (2) the external network relations (i.e. contacts outside the plantation) maintained by the slaves. Although it is not (yet) possible to link the sociohistorical evidence he presents directly to purely linguistic developments (cf. Labov 1994), it seems to be possible to make some general inferences about this relationship. The two aspects may have had linguistic consequences which were more or less opposed: an internal social stratification favoring linguistic differentiation, and an external social network system favoring homogenization (cf. also Lefebvre’s chapter). The first factor provides indirect support for the hypothesis that creole continua may have arisen quite early on. The contribution of the second factor to the levelling of creole varieties spoken on different plantations resulted in a more or less homogeneous creole, rather than a number of different creole ‘‘dialects’’, one for each plantation.

References Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Muysken, Pieter C. 1981. ‘‘Halfway between Quechua and Spanish: The case for relexification’’. In Historicity and Variation in Creole Studies, A. Highfield and A. Valdman (eds.), 52–78. Ann Arbor: Karoma. Sylvain, Suzanne. 1936. Le créole haïtien: Morphologie et syntaxe. Wetteren: Imprimerie de Meester/Port-au-Prince. [Private publication.]



Chapter 1

Relexification in creole genesis and its effects on the development of the creole* Claire Lefebvre

.

Introduction

There is a large consensus of opinion in the literature to the effect that creole languages are mixed languages in that they derive some of their properties from those of their substratum languages and some of their properties from those of the superstratum language (cf. Alleyne 1981; Holm 1988; etc.). Several scholars, however, have noticed that the type of mix we find in creole languages is not random. For example, Adam (1883: 4–7) states that: J’ose avancer . . . que les soi-disant patois de la Guyane et de la Trinidad constituent des dialectes négro-aryens. J’entends par là que les nègres guinéens, transportés dans ces colonies, ont pris au français ses mots, mais qu’ayant conservé dans la mesure du possible, leur phonétique et leur grammaire maternelles . . . Une telle formation est à coup sur hybride . . . La grammaire n’est autre que la grammaire générale des langues de la Guinée.1

Speaking of Haitian creole, Sylvain (1936:178) observes that: Nous sommes en présence d’un français coulé dans le moule de la syntaxe africaine, ou (. . .) d’une langue éwé à vocabulaire français.2

Similarly, in his extensive study of French-based creoles, Goodman (1964) observes, over and over again, that particular lexical items in the creoles have a phonological representation similar to a French word but that they share properties with corresponding lexical items in the African substratum languages. On the basis of data drawn from Ndyuka, Huttar (1971: 684) also remarks that ‘‘the use of morphemes borrowed by a pidgin or a creole language (. . .) from a European language often diverges from the use of the source morpheme in the source language’’ and often corresponds to the use of the corresponding word in the substratum languages. Voorhoeve (1973)

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Claire Lefebvre

makes a similar remark on the basis of Sranan and Saramaccan data. Koopman (1986) compares a number of lexical and syntactic properties in Haitian and in a sample of West African languages (Kru and Kwa languages, as well as one Mande and one Gur language). Her conclusion is twofold (Koopman 1986: 246): First, W. African languages share many properties amongst themselves, and secondly, these properties which include both lexical and syntactic properties tend also to be characteristic of Haitian.

Finally, Keesing (1988:1) writes: I had earlier been struck, when I had learned Solomons Pidgin in the 1960s through the medium of Kwaio, an indigenous language I already spoke fluently, that the learning task mainly required learning Pidgin equivalents of Kwaio morphemes. The syntax of Solomons Pidgin was essentially the same as the syntax of Kwaio, . . . there was a virtual morpheme-by-morpheme correspondance between Kwaio and Pidgin.

These observations suggest that creole languages are not formed by an arbitrary mixture of the properties of the languages present at the time they are being created. The pattern that seems to emerge from the observations reported above is the following: while the phonological forms of the lexical entries of a creole come from superstratum expressions, the semantic and syntactic properties of these lexical entries follow the pattern of the substratum languages. This raises the question of what the process which generates such a division of properties is. On the basis of Haitian data involving functional category lexical entries, I argue that the mental process of relexification accounts for this division of properties in a straightforward way (see also Lefebvre 1986, 1992, 1993a, b, 1998b and references therein; Lefebvre and Lumsden 1989, 1994). By its very nature, however, relexification cannot be the only process involved in creole genesis, even in the case of a radical creole such as Haitian. As is pointed out in Lefebvre and Lumsden (1994), relexification applies in creole genesis when the speakers of the substratum languages are targeting the superstratum language; when these speakers start targeting the relexified lexicons, that is, the early creole, they are no longer using relexification to develop the creole. It has been proposed that, when the speakers of the substratum languages start targeting the relexified lexicons, two other processes play a role in the development of the creole: dialect levelling (cf. Lumsden and Lefebvre 1994) and reanalysis (cf. Lefebvre 1984; Lefebvre and

Relexification in Creole genesis

Lumsden 1994). The data resulting from relexification will be shown to feed the processes of dialect levelling and reanalysis. In this chapter, I illustrate how these three processes apply in creole genesis on the basis of Haitian data involving functional category lexical entries. Before doing so, I provide a definition of these three processes.3 . Relexification The mental process of relexification has been shown to play a role in the genesis of mixed languages (cf. e.g. Muysken 1981). This process has also been argued to play a central role in creole genesis (cf. Lefebvre 1986, 1993a, b; Lefebvre and Lumsden 1989, 1994). According to Lefebvre and Lumsden’s (1994) formal definition of the process, relexification builds a new lexicon in the following way. The lexical entries of the lexicons of the substratum languages are copied, and the phonological representations in these copied lexical entries are replaced with phonological representations derived from the phonetic strings of the superstratum language or by null forms. The second step is referred to as relabelling. The choice of the pertinent phonetic string in the superstratum language to relabel a copied lexical entry is based on their use in specific semantic and pragmatic contexts such that, as is advocated in Muysken (1981), the semantics of the superstratum string must have something in common with the semantics of the substratum lexical entry that is being relabelled. In the literature on creole genesis, it has been pointed out that the makers of a creole do not identify the functional category lexical entries (i.e. determiners, complementizers, tense, mood and aspect markers, etc.) of the superstratum language (cf. Lefebvre 1984; Carden and Stewart 1988; Mufwene 1991; Lefebvre and Lumsden 1994; etc.) because of the limited access that they have to the data (cf. e.g. Thomason and Kaufman 1991). In Lefebvre and Lumsden (1994), it is claimed that the functional category lexical entries copied from the substratum languages are relabelled on the basis of phonetic strings of superstratum lexical categories. It is further claimed that when relexifiers do not find any appropriate phonetic string in the superstratum language, that is, a form which is both semantically and distributionally suitable, the copied functional category lexical entry may be assigned a phonologically null string, such that when this lexical entry is used in an utterance, it is not pronounced. The formal representation of the process of relexification provided in Lefebvre and Lumsden (1994) is illustrated schematically in (1).4

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Claire Lefebvre

(1) original lexical entry [phonology]i [semantic feature]k [syntactic feature]n

target language [phonetic string]j used in specific semantic and pragmatic contexts creole [phonology]j ¹ or [Ø] [semantic feature]k [syntactic feature]n

(=(1) in Lefebvre and Lumsden 1994)

Lefebvre and Lumsden’s (1994: 10) proposal makes the following prediction concerning word order in creoles: Since relexification is the first step in second language acquisition, the original aim of the relexifiers is to reproduce the phonetic strings of the superstratum language (. . .) Since the relexifiers intend to reproduce the phonetic strings of the superstratum language, the creole word order for lexical categories will be the word order of lexical categories in the superstratum language (. . .). On the other hand, since the relexifiers do not identify the superstratum functional categories, the word order for creole functional categories will be the same as the word order of the substratum categories that they were relexified from.

The data presented in this chapter will be shown to support the above claims. . Dialect levelling The process of dialect levelling has been observed in situations where dialects or languages are in contact (cf. e.g. Trudgill 1986; Siegel, this vol.). In Lumsden and Lefebvre (1994), it is proposed that this process plays a role in the development of creole languages. Since relexification is a mental process, it is necessarily an individual activity. Typically, situations where creoles are created involve several substratum languages (cf. Whinnom 1971). Thus, although relexification from a single superstratum language provides the early creole community with a common vocabulary (cf. Lumsden and Lefebvre 1994), the relexified lexicons from different substratum languages would not be homogeneous in the early creole. As Lumsden and Lefebvre (1994) proposed, some of these differences might be levelled out by the process of dialect levelling.

Relexification in Creole genesis

. Reanalysis Reanalysis is a process through which a particular phonological form associated with one lexical entry comes to be associated with another lexical entry (Lightfoot 1979). This process, sometimes referred to as grammaticalization (cf. e.g. Sankoff 1990; Hopper and Traugott 1993), has been shown to play a role in cases of regular linguistic change. For example, the preposition of in English has been reanalyzed as a case marker (Chomsky 1981). Likewise, according to Kayne’s (1981) analysis, the French forms à and de have a double status as prepositions and as complementizers. Lefebvre and Lumsden (1994) propose that, when speakers target the speech of the creole community, that is, the early creole, reanalysis plays a role in the further development of the creole. They claim, however, that in the early creole this process applies to a lexical entry that has been created through relexification but assigned a phonologically null representation (cf. (1)). As Lefebvre and Lumsden (1994: 13) put it: In the absence of visible phonological signals for a particular functional category, speakers [of the early creole] use periphrastic constructions to clarify information that is not being signalled. Speakers will then copy the phonological form of the key element of the periphrastic construction into the lexical entry of the previously hidden functional category. In this way, reanalysis provides an explicit signal for a creole lexical entry that was generated by relexification but did not acquire a phonological signal through relabelling . . . When reanalysis assigns this lexical entry a phonological signal, so that it becomes explicit in the creole expression, the creole lexical entry is visibly more like that of the substratum language.

In light of this theoretical background, I will now show how these three processes are implemented in the genesis of Haitian creole. I begin with phase 1 when adult native speakers of different substratum languages target the superstratum language and use the mental process of relexification in order to create a new language. Then I illustrate the processes that apply in the second developmental phase of the creole when the speakers target the relexified lexicons, that is, the early creole.

. Phase : Adult native speakers of substratum languages target the superstratum language This section illustrates how relexification applies to functional category lexical entries during the period when native speakers of substratum languages are targeting the superstratum language. Cases where the copied lexical entry is re-

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Claire Lefebvre

labelled on the basis of a superstratum phonetic string and cases where the copied lexical entry is assigned a phonologically null form will be discussed in turn. . Copy and relabel on the basis of superstratum phonetic strings .. The [+definite] determiner This section argues that the lexical entry of the Haitian determiner has been created through the process of relexification. The data and analysis reported on in this section are drawn from Lefebvre (1994a), based on a series of papers on the various facets of this Haitian lexical entry (e.g. Lefebvre 1982, 1992, 1996a, 1998a; Lefebvre and Massam 1988). Haitian creole has a postnominal determiner la (with the phonologically conditioned allomorphs a, an, nan and lan), as illustrated in (2). The presence of this determiner indicates that the information conveyed by the noun phrase is part of the shared knowledge of the participants in the conversation (cf. Fournier 1977; Lefebvre 1982; Lefebvre and Massam 1988). The Haitian determiner is not marked for gender. (2) a.

timounn nan child det ‘the child (in question/that we know of)’ b. liv la book det ‘the book (in question/that we know of)’

Haitian

Haitian

In contrast, the French determiner appears before the noun, as shown in (3), and it is specified for gender and number. Le is masculine singular, la is feminine singular, les is plural, and l’ is a phonologically conditioned allomorph. (3) a.

l’ enfant det child ‘the child’ b. le livre det book ‘the book’ c. la table det table ‘the table’

French

Relexification in Creole genesis

d. les livres/tables det books/tables ‘the books/tables’

In contrast with the Haitian determiner, the French determiner does not necessarily identify old or known information. According to Milner (1978: 23), the definite determiner is either anaphoric, identifying an object that already has been mentioned, or cataphoric. In the latter case, ‘‘l’article annonce une relative ou un génitif sans qu’aucune mention antérieure ne soit requise’’. The Haitian determiner cannot appear with nouns that have a generic or mass interpretation, but the French determiner must appear with such nouns (cf. Milner 1978: 25). These facts are illustrated in (4) and (5), respectively. (4) Pen bòn pou lasante. bread good for health ‘Bread is good for one’s health.’ (= (19) in Lefebvre 1994a)

Haitian

(5) *(Le) pain est bon pour la santé (det) bread is good for det health ‘Bread is good for one’s health.’ (= (24) in Lefebvre 1994a)

French

Furthermore, French has a partitive determiner de+la or du (a contracted form of de + le), which appears with mass nouns, as in (6). (6) Jean a mangé du pain. John aux eat de+le bread ‘John ate bread.’ (=(25) in Lefebvre 1994a)

French

According to Haase (1965), this partitive determiner has been attested in French since the fifteenth century. Milner (1978: 24) points out the exceptional character of French with respect to this partitive determiner and notes that in most languages the determiner does not appear in contexts where the French partitive determiner is manifested. Haitian follows the pattern of the majority of languages, as shown in (7), the Haitian counterpart of the French sentence in (6). (7) Jan manje pen. John eat bread ‘John ate bread.’

Haitian

Finally, in Haitian, the head noun and the determiner may be separated by a relative clause, as in (8).

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Claire Lefebvre

(8) Mounn [Ø ki pati] a. man op re-pro leave det ‘The man who left.’ (=(20) in Lefebvre 1994a)

Haitian

By contrast, in French, the head noun and the determiner may not be separated by a relative clause, as shown by the ungrammaticality of the sentence in (9). (9) *Le [qui est parti] homme det [who aux leave] man Lit.: ‘The [who left] man’ (=(26) in Lefebvre 1994a)

French

The determiner in Haitian creole and the determiner in French thus have quite different semantic and syntactic properties, which indicates that the properties of the Haitian creole determiner are not derived from French. Moreover, the French determiner does not appear to have been the source of the phonological representation of the Haitian determiner either. The French determiner is often found as part of Haitian simple nouns, as shown in (10). (10) Haitian nouns larivyè ‘river’ lakay ‘home’ listwa ‘history’ latè ‘world’ zwazo ‘bird’ zonnyon ‘onions’

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