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01h2LexDiffFin

as much as any creole data I've seen. Even in the conjugational paradigms of
Standard French, the imperfective suffix paradigms are more prominent than the only
possibly non-aspectual suffic paradigm of anteriority, the so called "simple past",
which by the way dropped out of use to the point of being almost obsolete. According
to Guillaume (1929:109), French is not only a highly aspect prominent language but
the verb systems as such is entirely based on aspectual distinctions. On the other
hand, I can't really see what kind of testing procedure it would take to establish
tense prominence and no model is proposed to investigate tense/aspect prominence in
the relevant African languages in any meaningful way. Parkvall himself seems to be
aware of this having included the discussion merely as a "suggestion for further
research".

The 3PL pronoun pluralization strategy in some FCs (Louisiane, Haiti, Guiana, p. 96)
has analogues in Trois-Rivières French as seen in examples (43a) and (43b) (for
Magoua and the mesolecte respectively):

(47)a

lé-fiy euzot son te pou vòté oui si nouzot onhe pa té la
"CL-girl 3PL AGRS PAST FUT vote if we AGRS NEG PAST there"
lé-fiy euzot yé te pour vòté oui si nouzot on àve pa (é)té la
"CL-girl 3PL AGRS PAST FUT vote if we AGRS AUX NEG PAST there"
"The girls would have voted "yes" if we hadn't been there"

(47)b

The feature is also shown to be conflating with Karipuna in (25C).

Quite strikingly, Parkvall resorts quite often to signalling the absence of FCs from
his list of features as "striking", "conspicuous", or "relative". It looks like as
if the thesis had been planned, drafted and written up on evidence from the
non-French Atlantic creoles and that the "French-lexifier" data were added sort of in
the last minute for the sake of completeness. Though I have heckled him in an eye
for eye manner on honesty and scholarship, I don't realy think his intentions went
beyond considerations conditioned by "lack of time" factors. OUT OF AFRICA would
certainly have been more of a "scholarly" accomplishment if he had excluded the
Frech-based creoles altogether on the same grounds as other pidgins and creoles "with
a substrate not belonging to the Niger-Congo phylum" were excluded (cf. his list
2000:1).

9.9.

CONCLUDING ON PARKVALL

"Lexical diffusion and the glottogenetics of creole French" was intended to
demonstrate that the French creoles are not the product of any creolization "out of
Africa" but the natural outcome of linguistic evolution subsequent to the
koineization of varieties of French "out of Paris". As such, it focussed on the
writings of people I had reason to believe to be exponents of the "black
creolization" hypothesis setting aside as irrelevant to the latter hypothesis the
question as to the extent to which creolization and koineization might be the same
thing. In response, Parkvall attempted from the outset to discredit my demonstration
as a "DISHONEST AND UNSCHOLARLY TREATMENT OF THE MATERIAL" at hand with a tendency to
"DELIBERATELY QUOTE CITATIONS COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTEXT". For all it's worth, I have
been able to show that Parkvall's accusations, if anything at all, reflect only
Parkvall's own failures with his data from the French-based creoles.

On the positive side, there are all the things he didn't question in my paper which I
must assume he agreed with.

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Printed for Henri Wittmann <hwittman@cgocable.ca>