Department of French and Italian

The study of the contact languages known as pidgins and creoles is central to the study of language contact and is highly relevant for numerous subfields of linguistics including SLA and typology. Scholarly debates concern how these languages arose and in what types of socio-historical setting, with competing perspectives on the roles played by the colonial language(s), the substrate languages, and language universals. We will examine the origins and development of numerous linguistic structures commonly associated with creole languages such as preverbal tense-mood-aspect (TMA) markers, aspect prominence, serial verbs, bimorphemic interrogatives, predicate cleft and ideophones. In addition to the role of language contact in pidgin and creole genesis, interesting issues emerge regarding contemporary contacts, especially with the original colonial language, leading to perspectives on so-called decreolization. We will also confront head-on the vexing question of whether a creole language can be identified as such synchronically, merely by examining its structure (is there a “Creole Prototype”?), or whether the category only exists from a socio-historical perspective.
The course meets in conjunction with LING L-636.

FRIT-F 679    #30320        12:45P-2:00P      MW       SY 200          Prof. Kevin Rottet