Number Delimitation in Gullah

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . ONEOF THE MOST ELUSIVE and challenging aspects of studying (contemporary) Gullah is the amount of both inter-and intra-individual variation in spontaneous speech even at the level of what may be considered its basilect.' The investigator is very likely to hear in the same discourse (though not with equal frequency) alternations such as [bil bin/woz horn] 'Bill was home' (where [bin] and [waz] are synonymous), or [A SAm]/[A si It]/[A S3: It] 'I saw it' (where the unmarked [si] alternates almost freely with [s::] and the phonologically conditioned allomorph [']); or [a:1 A wi]/[a:l AV As] 'all of us;'or [hiI kAm wI hi, SAn]/[Si, kAm wI hi, sAn]/[Si, kAm wI hal sAn] 'she came with her son'(with reference to the same individual). Such alternations are attested in the domain of number delimitation too: [dem baj] 'the/those boys' appears to be as good as [dem bajz], [tu: baj] 'two boys'as acceptable as [tu: bajz], [hi sAnz] 'his/her sons'as grammatical as [hi sAn dem] (even though the latter is ambiguous between 'his/her sons' and 'his/her son and company').Those who do not realize how different from English the underlying principles of number delimitation in English-related creoles are, or even how complex the underlying system of English itself is in this domain, are likely to assume too hastily that the two systems are fundamentally the same and that mostly a simple morpheme substitution or addition is involved in the above cases. Not surprisingly, interpretations holding that Gullah nouns have no plural forms or inflections, unlike their English counterparts, have occurred in the literature (see, for example, Johnson 1930, 35-36; Turner 1949, 223; Jones-Jackson 1983, 300-01). As will become more obvious below, underlying this partial misinterpretation are (1) the unclear stands of some analysts on the delimitational status of [dem] as plural marker (e.g., Cunningham 1970, 30-31) and on the redundancy of the English {-Z} plural when it cooccurs with a quantifier, and (2) the misidentification of the at times absolutely undelimited use of a bare noun/ nominal (henceforth NONINDIVIDUATED USE) with the English morphological indefinite plural. Thus, Rickford (1986) even attempts to account for the putative absence of the English plural {-Z} on some nouns by a Labovian {-Z} deletion rule. (This particular approach is disputed in part 4 below.) The purpose of this paper is to show that number delimitation in Gul-33 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 26 Dec 2014 13:53:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 34 AMERICAN SPEECH 61.1(1986) lah is governed by a body of principles which are somewhat different from those governing the corresponding distinctions in ...

The earliest Gullah/aave texts

“…Rickford (1990) demonstrates variability of plural marking in recent times (cf. also Mufwene, 1986), but still found that one speaker, Mrs. McQueen, used no marking 76% of the time.…”

The expression of number in Jamaican Creole

“…3.2 Mufwene (1984Mufwene ( , 1986 Mufwene does not challenge the view that the combination di … dem marks plurality: for him, dem is the JC postnominal pluralizer. He does, however, elaborate a different position based on the notion of individuation, showing that this operates differently in English than it does in JC and Gullah.…”

“…My analysis of post-nominal dem differs in important ways from Bailey (1966) and Mufwene (1984Mufwene ( , 1986. In the next section, I show the problems associated with these accounts of dem as a pluralizer.…”

“…Contra Bailey (1966) and Mufwene (1984Mufwene ( , 1986, I claim that di … dem should not be viewed as a plural marker, and should not be termed a 'pluralizer' . In what follows, I show that the JC marker does not behave in the same way as pluralizers do in number-marking languages, and conclude that there is no category of number in JC.…”

“…In this section, I look at the classical view upheld for decades, as put forth by Bailey (1966), and a more articulated analysis in Mufwene (1984Mufwene ( , 1986) based on semantic and syntactic considerations. I then show why such analyses of dem are incorrect.…”