The Short and Long Form of Verbs in Mauritian Creole: Functionalism Versus Formalism*

Syea, Anand

doi:10.1515/thli.1992.18.1.61

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Baker and Corne 1982;Syea 2009;Alleyne 1996: 49-56;Bartens 1998a: 387). the imperative), alternates with a short form derived from the third person singular.…”

Section: Functions Of Reduplication In Portuguese And/or Spanish-leximentioning

confidence: 99%

Creole languages

Bartens¹

2013

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“…Baker and Corne 1982;Syea 2009;Alleyne 1996: 49-56;Bartens 1998a: 387). the imperative), alternates with a short form derived from the third person singular.…”

Section: Functions Of Reduplication In Portuguese And/or Spanish-leximentioning

confidence: 99%

Creole languages

Bartens¹

2013

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“…The second verb in the examples that follow drops its final vowel if it is followed by a complement. For a detailed analysis of this phenomenon, see Seuren (1986), Syea (1992), and Veenstra (2009). The difference between (19a) on the one hand and (19b,c) on the other is clearly unexpected if they all involve coordination.…”

Section: A Coordination Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Serial Verb Constructions in Indian Ocean French Creoles (IOCs)

Syea

2013

JPCL

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This paper revisits the debate between Bickerton on the one hand and Seuren, Corne, Coleman and Curnow on the other on the question of whether serial verb constructions exist in the French creoles of the Indian Ocean (namely Seychelles Creole and Mauritian Creole). It examines data particularly from Mauritian Creole (which was rather marginally represented in that discussion) and argues in agreement with Bickerton (1989, 1996) that serial verbs do indeed exist in this creole just as they do in Seychelles Creole. However, it also argues that their presence in these languages must be attributed not to an innate linguistic mechanism (as claimed in Bickerton 1989, 1996) nor to a substrate source (contra Corne et al. 1996, Corne 1999) but to an independent internal development in which consecutive imperatives were reanalyzed as serial verb constructions. It is assumed that, given the socio-historical nature of creole contact situations, consecutive imperatives would have been a prominent part of early input as interchanges between those who spoke French and those who did not would have mostly been in the form of directives (commands, instructions, etc.) which are more often than not expressed through the imperative . However, it is recognized that this development could have benefited from substrate (particularly Malagasy) influence but it remains in the main the result of an internal diachronic process. The proposal outlined has interesting implications for the role of input and the role that adults may have played in the development of creole languages in general and serial verb constructions in particular. Some aspects of creole languages, it is suggested, can be adequately accounted for without having to implicate either an innate linguistic mechanism or wholesale transfer from substrate sources.

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“…In Mauritian Creole, the short‐vs.‐long verb‐form alternation depends on whether the post‐verbal phrase is an argument or an adjunct. There the generalization grosso modo is that the short form surfaces only when the verb is followed by an overt argument and that the long form surfaces elsewhere – for example, when the verb is followed by a wh‐ trace or an adjunct (Syea 1992). Moreover, instances of the Mauritian Creole long forms have been recently documented in Verum Focus constructions, which ‘emphasize the truth or falseness of the proposition expressed by the sentence’ (Henri and Abeillé 2008).…”

Section: Integrating Both Second‐ and First‐language Acquisition Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Acquisition in Creolization and, Thus, Language Change: Some Cartesian‐ Uniformitarian Boundary Conditions

DeGraff¹

2009

Language and Linguist. Compass

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1 Background and Objectives 1.1 Terminological and conceptual preliminaries: 'Creoles', 'Creole genesis', 'Creolization', etc. 1.2 Uniformitarian boundary conditions 1.3 Cartesian boundary conditions 1.4 Some landmarks for navigating through the many detours of this long essay 2 Whence 'Creole Genesis'?2.1 Making constructive use of the distinction and relation between 'I-languages' and 'E-languages' 2.1.1 The ontological priority of I-languages (and innovations therein) 2.1.2 'E-creoles' vs. 'I-creoles' 2.1.3 Findings about E-creoles and I-creoles complement each other 2.1.4 I-languages as 'linguistic fingerprints': no two idiolects are identical 2.1.5 Abrupt 'innovations' precede gradual 'spread' 2.2 Deconstructing 'gradualism' 2.2.1 Gradual 'change' in E-language reduces to abrupt steps in I-languages 2.2.2 Gradualism in acquisition, in creolization and in age-grading effects 2.2.3 The roles of children and adults vis-à-vis innovations and the spread thereof 2.3 On the formation of 'I-creoles' via parameter-(re)setting in I-languages -as in other cases of language change 2.3.1 'Poverty of the stimulus' arguments and 'the logical problem of language acquisition' 2. AbstractThis essay prescribes some broad 'Cartesian-Uniformitarian' boundary conditions for linguistic hypotheses about Creole formation. These conditions make constructive connections between Creole studies, historical linguistics and language-acquisition research. Here 'Cartesian' has a mentalist sense, as in Chomsky (1966): I consider the formation of so-called 'Creole' languages to be ultimately reducible to the creation, in certain sociohistorical contexts, of certain idiolects (i.e., individual internal, or 'I-', languages) in the minds of the 'first "Creole" speakers'. To avoid circularity, my use of the term 'Creole' in the phrase 'first "Creole" speakers' combines some of its original ethno-historical senses: I use the word 'Creole', in this particular context, to refer to the non-indigenous people of African or European descent that were born and raised in the colonial New World, in opposition to those that were born and raised in the Old Worlds of Africa and Europe. The term 'Uniformitarian' evokes Neogrammarian approaches to language change, as advocated, for example, by Osthoff and Brugmann (1878) and Paul (1890). It summarizes my fundamental working assumption that no sui generis or exceptional linguistic processes need to be postulated in order to explain the creation of these languages that have come to be labeled 'Creole': these languages were created by the same psycholinguistic mechanisms that are responsible for the creation of (I-)languages, and for linguistic diachronic patterns, everywhere else. Therefore, 'Creole' languages cannot be distinguished a priori from non-'Creole' languages on any linguistic-theoretical criteria -and 'Creole' languages can be genetically classified by the Comparative Method, on a par with non-'Creole' languages. Such assumptions go against popular claims about Creole genesis such as those ...

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The Short and Long Form of Verbs in Mauritian Creole: Functionalism Versus Formalism*

Cited by 14 publications

References 1 publication

Creole languages

Creole languages

Serial Verb Constructions in Indian Ocean French Creoles (IOCs)

Language Acquisition in Creolization and, Thus, Language Change: Some Cartesian‐ Uniformitarian Boundary Conditions

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