Konstanze Jungbluth (Erfurt/Tübingen)

How do speakers of Creoles broaden their vocabulary?
NN-sequences in Romance-based Atlantic Creole languages

How do speakers of Creoles broaden their vocabulary?
NN-sequences in Romance-based Atlantic Creole languages
This paper focuses on word formation, more precisely, on noun-noun-sequences in Portuguese-based Crioulo de Cabo Verde. Furthermore the data of Papiamentu and Palenquero, both Spanish-based Creoles, and of French-based Ayisyen spoken on Haiti are taken into consideration. The word formation patterns are compared to the former superstrata languages, too. By adding to the universal and African substrate dependent perspectives the Romance approach one-sided assessments will be straighten out and our understanding of word formation in Creole Languages will be deepened.¹

1 Introduction

The goal of this research paper is threefold: First I'd like to question the widely held view that Creole languages are simple and primitive. By presenting not only words or sentences but in fact a short text sample in Cape Verdean Creole, I hope that the reader can best develop his/her own intuitions about the functioning of a Creole. Second, I have singled out from the data striking aspects of noun-noun-sequences, on which I will show the orientation of the Creole to European, that is Romance, patterns². One of the most important tasks for the speaker of a Creole is to continually develop and normalize diverse possibilities of expression with a relatively limited primary vocabulary, in order to be able to do justice to the various necessities of daily and festive communication. To compare to the data on the Portuguese-based Cape Verdean Creole³, I will take into consideration the Spanish-based Creoles Palenquero and Papiamentu⁴, as well as the French-based Creole Ayisyen⁵. Third, I consider this to be a contribution to research of Creole languages from the Romance perspective. Most Creole language research is dominated by studies that are done in the generative paradigm. They are mostly interested in sentence structures. Data from Creoles are used in the hope of learning more about human-created Universal Grammar, as proposed by these linguists.⁶ Other researchers, familiar with one or another African language, choose another important perspective of Creoles. They will recognize African patterns in the Creole data, and place the influence of the substrate language in the foreground.⁷ But supporting this work is a comparison of Old and New World Romance-speaking areas. I will consider the Creole data against the background of the recognizably Romance pattern. In my opinion, we can deepen our understanding and straighten out one-sided assessments by considering them from three viewpoints, that is, the addition of universal and African substrate dependent perspectives to the Romance perspective.

This work is composed of 4 parts: the Introduction; Composition Patterns in the Romance Superstrata Languages (French, Spanish, and Portuguese); Noun-noun Sequences in Creole Languages contains two parts, Directly and Prepositionally Connected Noun-Noun Sequences in Crioulo do Cabo Verde and the comparison of the pattern found therein to Palenquero, Papiamentu and Ayisyen; and finally, The Contribution of Romance Linguistics to Creole Studies.

The four different Romance-based Creoles under consideration are shown on the following map.

The origins of these Atlantic Creoles can be understood as a product of the overseas trade triangle between Europe, Africa and America. The names of the cities marked on the map owe to this historical context. Creoles have established themselves primarily on islands. The communicative necessities of a multilingual society accompany the development of these comparatively young languages. The plantation economy, particularly the cultivation of sugar cane, required a constant source of manpower, which above all meant the import of African slaves to America. Also comparable to the situation on the islands are the slave settlements on the South American continent, which lay in inaccessible terrain. Cimarrones, slaves who escaped from the plantations and mines, constitute the beginning of these speech communities. Palenquero, represented by 1 on the map, is spoken by about 3000 people in San Basilio, Colombia. Papiamentu, represented by 2 and likewise Spanish-based, is used by about 200,000 speakers on the so-called ABC islands, the former Dutch Antilles, and in fact has official status.⁸ Spoken on Haiti, the French-based Ayisyen⁹ also has co-official status. With about 7 million speakers, the Haitians represent the largest Creole-speaking society in the Caribbean region. In the center of this work is Crioulo do Cabo Verde, which is Portuguese-based and is spoken by about 500,000 inhabitants of the seven islands archipelago off the coast of Senegal. Even more speakers than on Cabo Verde itself are scattered throughout the world, such that it is possible to talk of an about one million member linguistic culture. Larger Creole-speaking cultures live in North America, especially in Boston, in Holland, and on the west coast of Africa. The vast majority of studies available are of English-based Creoles. The French-based are also comparatively well studied. Far behind are the other, Spanish or Portuguese-based Creoles. Crioulo do Cabe Verde is the oldest known Creole still in use, and is in this respect of particular interest for linguistics. The historical development of the language reaches back almost 500 years. The islands were uninhabited until 1460, the year of their 'discovery' by the Portuguese.

Now that the linguistic situation has been detailed, I'd like to turn again to the research question: How do the Creoles broaden their vocabulary? This task is fundamental in the context of the history of a language which, by necessity, had to take vocabulary from former or concurrently-used trade languages. It may surprise the reader that the treatment of Creoles did not begin from this point.

My research paper demonstrates a framework in which this research suggestion can correspond to compositional procedures with regard to Crioulo do Cabo Verde, whereby it is possible to compare this study with the first findings on Romance-based Creoles, which were recently elaborated upon in Paris and Curaçao. Nomen-Nomen-sequences (NN-sequences) have until recently been little researched, even though in this context they acquire a particular importance. The literature is therefore dedicated to generalities, because the noun is more general compared to the verb, and, to cite Aristotle:

This task is not at all trivial in the context of Creole research, as I will show. Specific to one language I support myself with the recently published Dicionário do Crioulo da Ilha de Santiago, which relied on the research efforts of the DFG-Project¹¹ on Crioulo under the direction of Jürgen Lang in Erlangen. I will also take under consideration a few of his transcribed folktales and anecdotes, which allowed me to analyze the data in its context.

2 Patterns of composition in the Romance superstrata languages

In order to bring the background of Old World Romance-speaking area into focus, I have chosen two examples from each of the relevant Romance base-languages to demonstrate the pattern of Romance binominal composite word formation. Compared to the familiar and frequent composites of German, for example Schlüsselloch (keyhole) or Wortbildung (word formation), this method is much less common among Romance speakers. Nonetheless it can occur in two forms: one, as a direct noun-noun connection, in which the order of the determiner and the determined is the reverse of that in German. Spanish bocallave, literally mouth + key for 'keyhole', shows this postdetermining order. The other form that such noun-noun connections in Romance languages show is the connection with the preposition de. In diachronic perspective, the Latin genitive case marking is replaced by the prepositional additive de. Looking at the words' formation, some of these combinations solidified into composites that represent an object in spoken reality. For example, libro de bolsillo, 'pocket book', is a bound composite that generally does not permit insertions into its internal structure.

Table 1: Patterns of Noun Compositions in the Romance Superstrata Languages

Writing the compound with and without hyphen, together or separated is only secondary for the assessment of the composite character of the word formation. It mostly indirectly shows that the order of these binominal sequences in Romance languages between word formation and syntagma show fluid transitions.

Since data from Creoles has a particular character, I have chosen the term "NN-Sequences" and not "noun composites" in the subtitle of this work, the latter would be premature at this stage of research. The data must thus be interpreted in multiple ways, and its segmentation must first be clarified. Which sound combinations are allowable as words? Second, the question must be answered as to whether words involved are really nouns or not, because a morphologic marking on the word stems themselves is not common. Usually one and the same sequence of sounds can represent a noun, adjective or verb. The transcribed data correspondingly do not show any markings as to which part of speech the words should be ascribed to. Their classification is created by the context, be it a conversational context or the situation itself. In addition the decision must be made in a further step as to whether the syntagmatic order should be considered a compound or as a syntagma alone. Even in this point it is necessary to weigh different aspects of form and content in order to prepare a relevant classification.

3 NN-sequences in Creoles

The following text excerpt, in which may be found various noun determinations but in which many NN-sequences may be observed, should provide an integrated impression of the Portuguese-based Atlantic Creole we are studying. The excerpt is drawn from a corpus of 44 transcribed anecdotes, which André dos Reis Santos gathered from an elderly Cape Verdean by the name of Nastásia. She tells a story typical to this cultural context, about a young man who emigrated to America, and then, once of marriageable age, returned. Before he can ask the hand of his beloved in the house of his future in-laws, he must first undergo a metamorphosis, a kind of complete re-acculturation.

Illustration 1: NN-sequence pánu bicu

The illustration shows that nouns can be more closely determined via various methods in Creoles as well. The nouns specified by postposed adjectives do not differentiate themselves from Portuguese expressions in terms of sequence (lines 2 and 4). To understand the data in the following, of particular use are the terms di tera, literally 'of the land', meaning 'local'; and the last term boka tardi, by which the interpretation of tardi as a noun is only determined by context, such that this word can also be used as an adjective in the meaning of late and as verb in the meaning of 'to linger', 'to allow oneself time', and also in the sense of 'to come late'.

3.1 Directly and Prepositionally Bound NN-sequences

I would like to focus in particular on the apparently unbound sequences of two nouns, which I call direct NN-sequences.

In order to broaden the base of data, I present another example which demonstrates this commonly occurring sequence. The present tense of these connections in every Creole language text stands out from the norm in texts of Old World Romance languages. Even three nouns are often set beside each other. In the following illustration the word bóka 'mouth', which we know from the previous example, appears again, this time in the middle of the group.

Illustration 2: NNN-sequence nxada bóka gudja

The phrase di tera, which appeared in Illustration 1 with the sense of 'local, native, from Cabo Verde' is altered in the following illustration to -l tera, because the preceding noun ends with a vowel and the succeeding noun begins with a consonant. Moreover, the additive sucri-l tera, with which the native (light brown) sugar is meant, depicts a lexical unit, which must be recognized to contain a lemmatic quality that forces the closing together of the nouns. The example originates from the collection of folktales Na bóka noti, literally 'In the Mouth of Night'.

Illustration 3: NN-l N-sequence sucri-l téra

This close compounding of two nouns also occurs with parts of the body, which in this case take on an intrinsically specific meaning. Their entry in the Crioulo da Ilha de Santiago dictionary illustrates a lexicalized use that no longer varies freely:

Illustration 4: N-l N-sequence kántu-l bóka, N d-N-sequence kántu d'odju

This illustration will be useful later in connection with observations of the Spanish-based Creole Palenquero.

A comparison of the following two words shows how the creative compounding of two two-syllable words in both cases leads to a new lexical unit, which can also be considered a single compositional multisyllabic noun. However, its lemmatic quality must at least be accounted for. From águ, 'water' and odju, 'eye' are formed:

Illustration 5: N d-N Sequences

Frequent use stabilizes the convention and assures its entry into the lexicon. In addition, it is not rare to find lexemes built in similar fashion at different times, syntactic aggregations, and possibly loanwords from Portuguese that are either conventional in other speech styles or marked as "high speech". ²⁵

The Iberoromance illustrations above strengthen my decision to conceive the direct NN-sequences as maximally integrated, because they may be taken from a different perspective as new, multisyllabic lexical units in the vocabulary and therefore stand virtually ready for a new process of compounding. I would turn attention back to Illustration 2, in which the noun bóka gudja shows a closer relationship than that with nxada and both following nouns.

The data presented from Crioulo do Cabo Verde can in my opinion be summarily and sensibly placed between the poles of Aggregation and Integration. The conception developed from sentence links seems plausibly fruitful for word compounding as well.

Table 2: Noun compound patterns in Crioulo do Cabo Verde

In preparation for the next section, I would like to stress that the parallelism between form and degree of integration in Crioulo do Cabo Verde can at least be observable to a certain degree, even when isolated examples must be classified at the edges of their respective zones on the Möbius Strip above.

3.2 Crioulo do Cabo Verde in Comparison with Palenquero, Papiamentu and Ayisyen

A cursory look at both individual studies, with regard to the noun complexes in Iberoromance-based Creoles which we are interested in, shows that the Cape Verdean Crioulo's observable variation in direct NN-sequences and in NN-sequences bound by di can also be established in Palenquero, but not in Papiamentu, which in support of the superstrata model regularly binds compounds using di.²⁷

Table 3: Patterns of Noun Compounding in Palenquero, Papiamentu and Ayisyen

In summary, the four Creoles presented here can be characterized in the following way:

Table 4: Comparison of Noun-Noun-sequences in the Creoles in consideration

This observation is surprising given that the French-based Ayisyen also knows no binding at the sentence level, and in this way is different from French. Papiamentu has conventionalized compounding with di to such an extent that comparison with Spanish texts is no longer possible. In no way are both of the Creoles to which both patterns are available based on the same Romance language. Palenquero is based on Spanish, Crioulo do Cabo Verde on Portuguese.

The use of the formation patterns varies specifically to each individual language, such that the combinations observed in Crioulo do Cabo Verde between form and degree of integration cannot be seamlessly transferred into the word formation of the other Creoles in consideration here.

While the absence of the pattern of prepositional compounds is yet be established for Ayisyen, this area of concern embraces nearly the whole. According to Dijkhoff, the small remainder simply represents the binominally transparent composites loaned from Spanish. For its part, Palenquero shows more variation of the two compounding methods than Crioulo do Cabo Verde. What all Creoles have in common is that a shift toward the Integrative pole is generally accompanied by a joining of the nouns. I interpret the elision of vowels in Cape Verdean and the elision of consonants in Papiamentu and Palenquero in this sense.

4 The Contribution of Romance Linguistics to Creole Studies

The Romanist perspective contributes a deepening of understanding of these methods in research into Creole languages. The methods of binding connectorless NN-sequences, meager from a universal perspective and which in some African languages is preferably used for inherent combinations, converges with both known morphological types from the Romance languages: the availability of the pattern from various sources contributes in my opinion to a high frequency of these bi- and multi-nominal compounds in Creoles³³. Research of Creoles must seek a connection between these different perspectives, because

The influence of the substratum with regard to composites is validated by Lefebrve³⁴ (1998) and Moñino³⁵ (to appear).

The patterns of these methods of word formation are, however, just as demonstrable in the superstrata languages. Many of the NN-composites in Romance languages also show a genitive function³⁶. The convergence of the patterns may have led to the high productivity of the NN-sequences in the Creole language data. The complexity of the processes do not differentiate themselves from the established processes of the Old World in this area of word formation. Composites originate, like in all languages, according to the need to communicate needs. On the basis of a relatively uncomplicated primary vocabulary, the Creole speaker coins new words from two or more nouns with predetermined binds, words that over time are normalized. In exactly the same way, the variations within a single language, which do not copy the preferred methods of the respective former colonial languages but rather develop various predilections in the Creoles, show that the patterns of word formation are productive in individually characteristic ways. The comparison of different Romance-based Creoles of the Atlantic region demonstrates the autochthonous development of these languages.

List of Abbreviations

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Corpora

Notes