Conceptual Construal, Convergence and the Creole Lexicon

Corum, Micah

doi:10.4324/9780367817374-7

Cited by 3 publications

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“…English-lexified African creoles, for example, have numerous English words in their lexicons. Yet those words frequently reflect the cultural substratum of African languages, even if they fit cross-linguistically common patterns of conceptualization (Corum 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Some remarks on the duality of the concept of time in the lexicon of Tok Pisin

Kosecki

2022

beyond

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The duality of the concept of time in Tok Pisin, an English-lexified creole and one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea, manifests itself in the Melanesian-European elements that make up its temporal lexicon. Expressions that reflect the local semantic-cultural substratum – motivated by astronomical, natural, and religious events – have functioned side by side with their counterparts provided by the English superstratum, which reflect clock measures of time and represent it as a resource and money. The competing impact of indigenous and Western elements is also present in representations of time as space and in forms of temporal succession. The analysed expressions show that the concept of time in Tok Pisin not only reflects partial Anglicization, but also shares cross-linguistically common patterns of time construal with non-contact languages having much longer histories.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Some remarks on the duality of the concept of time in the lexicon of Tok Pisin

Kosecki

2022

beyond

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On metonymy-based lexical innovations in Nigerian Pidgin English and Tok Pisin: A cognitive linguistic perspective

Kosecki

2023

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics

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As contact languages, pidgins and creoles arise in mixed linguistic environments. Drawing much of their vocabularies from one, frequently European, language and – to a lesser extent – from a number of indigenous languages, they have lexicons that are reduced in comparison with those of their lexifiers. To compensate for the poor lexification, pidgin and creoles create novel polysemy-based extensions of lexical items or develop periphrastic constructions equivalent of the missing lexical roots. Assuming a cognitive linguistic perspective, which emphasizes the role of conceptualization in the construction of meaning and the figurative character of concepts, the paper deals with the lexicons of Nigerian Pidgin English and Tok Pisin, two contact languages representative for the Atlantic and the Pacific – the two major areas of linguistic contact. The analysis focuses on the first of the above-mentioned compensation strategies. It is argued that (i) the expressions borrowed from English and various indigenous languages acquire senses that are absent in English; (ii) the new senses are frequently based on metonymy, which serves as a major polysemy-based strategy of lexicon extension; (iii) most of the novel lexical extensions fall within the metonymic patterns that are well-established in English.

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Cognitive Semantics Against Creole Exceptionalism: A Case Study of Body Part Expressions in Nigerian Pidgin

Kosecki

2024

Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric

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One of the claims of creole exceptionalism is that creole languages have lexicons of reduced conceptual and expressive complexity. Building on previous studies of the lexicon of Nigerian Pidgin/NP and the applications of the cognitive linguistic framework in creole linguistics, the present paper aims to counter the exceptionalism claim by analysing the conceptual structure of body part expressions in NP. It is argued that the expressions not only involve embodied universal patterns of imaginative reasoning, but also blend the substratum patterns of West African languages with the superstratum influence of colonial lexifiers, especially English. Thanks to this, NP speakers can deal with diverse aspects of experience, such as emotions, mental life, social interaction, or business transactions, which is strong evidence for the complex conceptual structure and the richly expressive character of the NP lexicon.

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Conceptual Construal, Convergence and the Creole Lexicon

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Some remarks on the duality of the concept of time in the lexicon of Tok Pisin

Some remarks on the duality of the concept of time in the lexicon of Tok Pisin

On metonymy-based lexical innovations in Nigerian Pidgin English and Tok Pisin: A cognitive linguistic perspective

Cognitive Semantics Against Creole Exceptionalism: A Case Study of Body Part Expressions in Nigerian Pidgin

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