in question, most of which happened to be from Africa, experienced language shift in
an enironment where there was no motivation to acquire French tel quel.
shift in an enironment where there was no motivation to acquire" the local Indian
language "tel quel" though they outnumbered the Indians to a much greater extent than
the African ever outnumbered the French.
same thing has happened elsewhere to people not of African descent.
African descent.
accused anyone of racism will change his mind, now that Wittmann has suggested that
I think "immigrants from Africa are less smart than immigrants from elsewhere" and
that my "perception of verb serialization in the relevant African languages is
somewhat daintily perverted with ditherings of unconscious albocentrism".
once again of Salikoko Mufwene's (04/02/01):
is implied by what we say.
I couldn't "help feeling" your perception of things to be "somewhat daintily
perverted with ditherings of unconscious albocentrism".
regarding the interpretation of phonological and morphosyntactic data from the
Atlantic varieties of creole French (2000:25-97) to the extent they havn't been
discussed yet and leaving side other concerns that could merit an appropriate review:
with few exceptions, to items where the loss of a final /r/ can be inferred
suggesting the existence of some kind of empty category of aperture at the open-mid
level. The same is however true for all varieties of koine French, etymological
open-mid vowels either raising to closed-mid or lowering to low (Wittmann 1996). If
I style the <(é)tait> : <(é)té> opposition which neutralizes to /té/ in the southern
varieties of koine French as /te/ : /té/ in the northern ones, it's purely for
reasons of underlying phonology, the surface phonology gets us [tà] : [té].
Likewise, the non-occurrence of closed-mid vowels in other positions of the Atlantic
FCs are interpreted as categorial holes in complementary distribution with the
missing aperture in word-final positions. These holes in the distribution of
apertures in the phonologies of Atlantic varieties of creole French seem to warrant a
general conclusion on p. 151 that a "reduction of four degress of aperture to three"
might be compatible alternatively with Bantu or Upper Guinean origins. As it is,
Magoua and more closely related varieties of koine French have three degrees of
aperture inherited from the Picard input into the original koine whereas four degrees
of aperture systems are a later development (Wittmann 1996; cf. the vowel diagram on
p. 1 of my handout). The three degrees of aperture system is maintained also in the
Indian Ocean varieties of creole French.
koine French that in Standard French and are extant only on one degree of aperture.
Most front rounded vowel occurrences are restricted to positions where schwa
insertion obtains.
development as claimed on p. 30 but are koine related besides being extant in all
Indian Ocean varieties of creole French (Wittmann 1996; cf. the vowel diagram on p. 1
based on three degress of aperture, each degree of aperture having its own contrasts
of [±lax] and [±nasal].
rhotacisms discussed pp. 33-38, the former is a standard feature of Karipuna (the
language being itself known as Karipuna, Kalipuna, Garifuna, Galifuna, etc.), the
latter splits Québec into two halfs, the isoglosse line running North-South not far
away from Trois-Rivières.
"stronger Senegambian component in FC formation" of p. 54 refers to a "tendency
towards CV syllable structure" on p. 52 or to Holm's (1988:113) "absence of
word-final consonant clusters", the same features may be said to exist in koine
French. Weighing my 200 word-list of Haitian Creole (Wittmann 1973a, b) against
lists for Magoua and Standard French, Parkvall's 26% to 11% ratio for vowel initial
items in French and Haitian Creole drops to 17% for Standard French, 5.5% for Haitian
Creole and 4.5% for Magoua when nouns are listed with their corresponding noun class
prefix as this would be the case if Bantu items were listed. As for consonant
cluster simplification in Québec French and Haitian Creole, Nikièma (1999) sees them
on a par with each other (cf. Wittmann 1996). If on the other hand I misread totally
pp. 52-55 on syllable structure, I defy Parkvall to tell us what exactly the impact
of these pages on creole French could be and in which ways the syllable structure of
creoleFrench differs from that of koine French.
in creole French phonology, I refrain for lack of time from making a list of
koine-creole continuities in this respect (cf. Wittmann 1996). On the side of
morphosyntax:
constructions in French (2000:57-60), they are just as marginal in creole French.
The class of verbs supporting body-part complementation as markers of reflexivity is
a small semantically severely restricted set. Even at that, as Sylvain 1936:110
reminds us of, it's for purposes of "emphasis" only. Moreover, for any example for
Haitian Creole that comes to my mind with /kò/ "body", I have a corresponding example
in Magoua with /ku/ "ass" (according to Parkvall, this would be an Igbo feature):
"he self wash body-his"
lui i-té s-làvé l-ku(Magoua)
"he AGRS-PAST self-wash CL-ass"
il s'est lavé(Standard French)
"he washed"
"remove body-yours (from) there"
ot ton-ku d-dla(Magoua)
"remove your-body from-there"
retire-toi de là(FS)
"get out of the way"
"he throw body-his totheground"
(pi lui) i-kris son-ku àter(Magoua)
"(and he) AGRS-throw his-ass totheground"
il s'est jeté par terre
"he trew himself to the ground"
"I FUT manage body-mine for I see if I FUT get a job in Kolas"
m a m-grouyé l-ku pou (mwén) wè si m a ponyé èn djòb à chòp(Magoua)
"I FUT manage CL-ass for (I) see if I FUT get a job at factory"
je me débrouille pour voir si je peux trouver du travail à la Kolas(FS)
"I'll make a move to see whether I can find a job at the local factory"
tas ton-ku(Magoua)
"move your-ass"
pousse ta viande(Paris slang)
"move your meat"
pousse-toi(FS)
"move over"
no offense meant. The fact that /CL-ku/ or /POSS-ku/ is not determined in any way by
a corresponding AGRO or DET is indicative of a quasi-grammatical function. The same
is true for Haitian Creole. Nevertheless, the phenomenon has a restricted
distribution in the lexicon. For the fun of it, I took the Grevisse (a standard
reference for the grammar of Standard French;I used the 9th edition of 1969) and I
opened pp. 549-59 on reflexivity. I could barely find one verb supporting the
kò/ku-type of reflexivization
let me state for the record that even Standard French has preverbal negation in basic
word order:
"tense"). However, we have already seen that the possibility of movement is sverely
restricted in koine French.
to be substrate-derived. That cannot be so since Indian Ocean varieties of creole
French ("with a substrate not belonging to the Niger-Congo phylum", 2000:1), koine
varieties of French and Karipuna have here the same range of uses. It's in fact a
picardism.
seen from the Magoua example in (7a). As a matter of fact, reduplication is more
extensive in Québec French than in most FCs (cf. Drapeau & Roy 1981).
seen to be substrate-induced. For Haitian, the source seems to be Valdman (1978:217)
who however documents the phenomenon as a "negative prospective" only:
"I NEG-FUT give you much money"
"I won't give you much money"
avoidance strategy of /pa/ with the regular future /a, va, ava/ (cf. Sylvain 1936:87)
and that the negative to non-negative spill-over is a recent innovation. As for the
LC /ape/ as a non-progressive, it's not prospective to the same extent as HC /ap/ and
translates into Standard French as an "anticipatory" present tense. The same effect
can be obtained in all varieties of Trois-Rivières French with the progressive /àpre/
in replacement of /pou/:
"Milette AGRS-PROGR/FUT AGRO-install your-furnace tomorrow-morning"
"Milette is going to install your furnace tomorrow morning"
temperatures of below 25 Celsius, /pou/ would have been used. Using the progressive
/àpre/ was meant to render the "tomorrow-morning" more immediate and thus more
acceptable to the customer.
as meaning that "TMA markers of the imperfective domain show a higher degree of
grammaticalization than do the various markers whose primary semantic contribution is
+past."Though no examples are given in this short and very dense section of
Parkvall's thesis, I think that my Magoua data qualifies as "aspect prominent" just