Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T05:47:29.562Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Deletion as an indicator of SVO → SOV shift

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

J. Clancy Clements
J. Clancy Clements
Affiliation:
Indiana University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Indo-Portuguese (IP) creoles display a well-known and uniform manner of marking the simple past and present continuous with the preposed particles ja (<Ptg. já ‘already’) and tE (<Ptg. esta ‘is’), respectively. Moreover, n3 (<Ptg. no ‘in the’) and d3 (<Ptg. de ‘of, from’ or do ‘of, from the’) are typically used as prepositions to express goal or location. Those creoles with Neoaryan adstrat languages, of which Korlai Creole Portuguese (KP) is one, theoretically possess the option of deleting these markers or prepositions if they are contextually or otherwise redundant. Using data from several sources spanning approximately 100 years, it is shown that ja, tE, n3, and d3 in KP have undergone or are undergoing gradual deletion. It is argued that this development is part of a much larger SVO → SOV shift. The status of the typological shift indicators of verb-object/complement, adposition, and adjective-noun order are shown to corroborate the findings regarding deletion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , July 1990 , pp. 103 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baxter, A. (1988). A grammar of Kristang (Malacca Creole Portuguese). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bickerton, D. (1983). Creole languages. Scientific American 249:116–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boxer, C. (1963). Race relation in the Portuguese colonial empire. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Boxer, C. (1975). Women in Iberian expansion overseas, 1415–1815. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Clements, J. C. (1990a). Elements of resistance in language contact-induced change. Unpublished manuscript, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Clements, J. C. (1990b) Foreigner talk as the origin of the Indo-Portuguese creoles. Unpublished manuscript, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Coseriu, E. (1958). Sincronía, diacronía e historia. Montevideo.Google Scholar
Cunha, Gerson da. (1876). Notes on the history and antiquities of Chaul and Bassein. Bombay: Thacker, Vining and Co.Google Scholar
Dalgado, S. R. (1903). Dialecto indo-português de Damāo. Ta-ssi-yang-kuo 3:359–367; 4:515–522.Google Scholar
Dalgado, S. R. (1906). Dialecto indo-português do Norte. Revista Lusitana 9:142–166; 193–228.Google Scholar
Dalgado, S. R. (1922). Dialecto indo-português de Gôa. Reimpressāo facsimile. Rio de Janeiro: J. Leite & Co.Google Scholar
D'Costa, A. (1968). The rendition of Chaul. Indica 5:58–64.Google Scholar
Dryer, M. (1988). Object-verb order and adjective-noun order: Dispelling a myth. Lingua 74:185–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferraz, L. (1987). Portuguese creoles of West Africa and Asia. In Gilbert, G. (ed.), Pidgin and creole languages. Essays in memory of John E. Reinecke (pp. 337–360). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Hancock, I. (1975). Malacca Creole Portuguese: Asian, African or European. Anthropological Linguistics 17:211–236.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John. (1979). Implicational universals as predictors of word order change. Language 55:618–648.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, John. (1980). On implicational and distributional universals of word order. Journal of Linguistics 16:193–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, John. (1983). Word order universals and their explanation. New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Humbert, J. (1964). Catholic Bombay, her priests and their training. 2 vols. Bombay: International Eucharistic Congress.Google Scholar
Jackson, D. (1987). Um conto folclórico no crioulo Indo-Português. Bulletin des Etudes Luso-Brésiliennes 89–98.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, D. (1988). Syntactic change. In Linguistics: The Cambridge survey (vol. 1, pp. 303–323). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Luján, Marta, Minaya, Liliana & Sankoff, David. (1984). The universal consistency hypothesis and the prediction of word order acquisition stages in the speech of bilingual children. Language 60:343–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matsumoto, Y. (1988). From bound grammatical markers to free discourse markers: History of some Japanese connectives. Berkeley Linguistic Society 14:340–351.Google Scholar
Mittewallner, G. v. (1964). Chaul: Eine unerforschte Stadt an der Westküste Indiens. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mühlhäusler, P. (1986). Pidgin and Creole linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Muysken, Pieter. (1981). The Spanish that Quechua speakers learn: L2 learning as norm-governed behavior. To appear in Anderson, Roger W. (Ed.), Proceedings of the First North American-European Workshop on Second Language Learning.Google Scholar
Naro, Anthony. (1978). A study on the origins of pidginization. Language 54(2):314–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schuchhardt, Hugo. (1884). Allgemeineres über das Indoportugiesische (Asioportugiesische). Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie. 13:476–516.Google Scholar
Smith, Ian. (1977). Sri Lanka Creole Portuguese phonology. Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Smith, Ian. (1979). Convergence in South Asia: A creole example. Lingua 48:193–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Ian. (1985). The development of morphosyntax in Sri Lanka Portuguese. York [UK] Papers in Linguistics 14.Google Scholar
Theban, L. (1975). From Creole syntax to universal semantics. Paper given at the International Conference on Pidgins and Creoles,Honolulu, Hawaii.Google Scholar
Theban, L. (1985). Situação e perspectivas do português e dos crioulos de origem portuguesa na India e no Sri-Lanka. Congresso sobre a situação actual da lingua portuguesa no mundo. Actas (vol. 1, pp. 269–286). Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Lingua Portuguesa.Google Scholar
Theban, M. (1973). Structura propozitiei in portugheza si indo-portugheza. Studii si Cercetari Lingvistice 24:639–645.Google Scholar
Theban, M. & Theban, L. (1980). L'evolution du système verbal dans les créoles indo-portugais. In Le verbs roman (pp. 149–161). Bucharest: Universitatea din Bucureşti.Google Scholar
Thomason, S. & Kaufman, T. (1988). Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. (1982). From propositional to textual and expressive meanings: Some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization. In Lehmann, W. & Malkiel, Y. (Eds.), Perspectives on historical linguistics (pp. 245–271). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. (1988). Pragmatic strengthening and grammaticalization. Berkeley Linguistic Society 14:406–416.Google Scholar