Article published in:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 35:2 (2020) ► pp. 218–252

Transparency and language contact

The case of Haitian Creole, French, and Fongbe

| University of Maryland, College Park , USA
When communicating speakers map meaning onto form. It would thus seem obvious for languages to show a one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form, but this is often not the case. This perfect mapping, i.e. transparency, is indeed continuously violated in natural languages, giving rise to zero-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one opaque correspondences between meaning and form. However, transparency is a mutating feature, which can be influenced by language contact. In this scenario languages tend to evolve and lose some of their opaque features, becoming more transparent. This study investigates transparency in a very specific contact situation, namely that of a creole, Haitian Creole, and its sub- and superstrate languages, Fongbe and French, within the Functional Discourse Grammar framework. We predict Haitian Creole to be more transparent than French and Fongbe and investigate twenty opacity features, divided into four categories, namely Redundancy (one-to-many), Fusion (many-to-one), Discontinuity (one meaning is split in two or more forms,) and Form-based Form (forms with no semantic counterpart: zero-to-one). The results indeed prove our prediction to be borne out: Haitian Creole only presents five opacity features out of twenty, while French presents nineteen and Fongbe nine. Furthermore, the opacity features of Haitian Creole are also present in the other two languages.
Keywords: Haitian Creole, Fongbe, French, transparency, language contact, Functional Discourse Grammar
Published online: 01 October 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00060.seg
References

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.
2012 Languages of the Amazon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Aksu-Koç, Ayhan A. & Dan I. Slobin
1985 Acquisition of Turkish. In Dan I. Slobin (ed), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 1. The data, 839–878. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Arends, Jacques, Pieter Muysken, & Norval Smith
1995 Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Audring, Jenny
2009 Gender assignment and gender agreement. Morphology 18: 93–116. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
[ p. 250 ]
Bakker, Peter, Aymeric Daval-Markussen, Mikael Parkvall & Ingo Plag
2011 Creoles are typologically distinct from non-creoles. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 26(1). 5–42. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Laurie
2003 Introducing linguistic morphology (Second Edition). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar
2011 Grammatical relations typology. In Song, Jae J. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook Of Linguistic Typology, 399–444. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Blasi, D. E., Michaelis, S. M., & Haspelmath, M.
2017 Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages. Nature Human Behaviour 1(10). 723–729. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Blom, Elma, Daniela Polišenská, & Fred Weerman
2008 Articles, adjectives and age of onset: The acquisition of Dutch grammatical gender. Second Language Research 24. 297–331. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bonenfant, Jacques L.
2011 History of Haitian Creole: from Pidgin to Lingua Franca and English Influence on the Language. Review of Higher Education and Self-Learning 4(11). 27–34.Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville G.
2006 Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen
2004 The growth and maintenance of linguistic complexity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Davis, William D. & Stanley Dubinsky
2004 The Grammar of Raising and Control: A Course in Syntactic Argumentation. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
DeGraff, Michel
2001 Kreyòl Ayisien. In John Holm & Peter L. Patrick (eds.), Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel Outlines of 18 Creole Grammars. London: Battlebridge Pubblications.Google Scholar
Dereau, Léon
1995 Cours de Kikongo. Namur: Wesmael-Charlier.Google Scholar
Dik, Simon C.
1978 Functional Grammar. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Downing, Laura J. & Barbara Stiebels
2012 Iconicity*. In Jochen Trommer (ed.), The Morphology and Phonology of Exponence, 379–426. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Durie, Mark
1985 A grammar of Acehnese: On the basis of a dialect of North Aceh. Dordrecht-Holland/Cinnaminson-USA: Foris Publications.Google Scholar
Gess, Randall, Chantal Lyche & Trudel Meisenburg
2012 Phonological Variation in French, Illustrations from Three Continents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Glaude, Herby
2012 Aspects de la syntaxe de l’Haïtien. Paris: Anibwé.Google Scholar
Hall, Robert A.
1966 Pidgin and Creoles Languages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Hengeveld, Kees
2007 Parts-of-speech systems and morphological types, ACLC Working Papers 2(1). 31–48.Google Scholar
2011a Transparency in Functional Discourse Grammar. Linguistics in Amsterdam 4. 1–22.Google Scholar
2011b Epilogue: Degrees of transparency. Linguistics in Amsterdam 4(2). 110–114.Google Scholar
Hengeveld, Kees & Lachlan J. Mackenzie
2008 Functional Discourse Grammar: a Typologically-based Theory of Language Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto
1917 Negation in English and Other Languages. Copenhagen: Høst.Google Scholar
Kusters, Wouter
2003 Linguistic complexity: The influence of social change on verbal inflection. PhD dissertation, Leiden University.Google Scholar
[ p. 251 ]
Langacker, Ronald
1977 Syntactic reanalysis. In Charles Li (ed.), Mechanisms of syntactic change, 56–139. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger
1997 Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lefebvre, Claire, Hélène Magliore-Holly, & Nanie Piou
1982 Syntaxe de l’Haïtien. USA: Karoma Publishers INC.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Claire & Anne-Marie Brousseau
2002 A Grammar of Fongbe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leufkens, Sterre
2013 The transparency of creoles, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 28 (2). 323–362. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2015 Transparency in Language: A Typological Study. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, David W.
1979 Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lupyan, Gary & Rick Dale
2010 Language structure is partly determined by social structure, PLoS ONE 5 (1). 1–10. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McWorther, John H.
1998 Identifying the creole prototype: vindicating a typological class. Language 74, No. 4. 788–818. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McWhorter, John
2001 The world’s simplest grammars are creole grammars. Linguistic Typology 5. 125–166. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McWhorter, John H.
2011 Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Miestamo, Matti
2006 On the feasibility of complexity metrics, In Kerge Krista & Maria Maren Sepper (eds.), FinEst Linguistics: Conference Proceeding of The Annual Finnish and Estonian Conference of Linguistics May 6–7 2004, Eesti Filoloogia Osakonna Toimtited 8, 11–26. Tallinn: TLÜGoogle Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko S.
1996 The founder principle in creole genesis. Diachronica 13:1. 83–134. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2015 Pidgin and Creole Languages. International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (Second Edition). 133–145. Oxford: Elsevier. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Omar, Margaret
1973 The acquisition of Egyptian Arabic as a native language. The Hague: Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, John
2011 A grammar of Kharia. A South Munda language. Leiden: Brill. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Seuren, Pieter & Herman Wekker
1986 Semantic transparency as a factor in creole genesis. In Muysken, Pieter & Norval Smith (eds.), Substrata versus Universals in Creole Genesis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 57–70. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Siegel, Jeff
2008 The emergence of pidgin and creole languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, Dan I.
1977 Language change in childhood and history. In John Macnamara (ed.), Language Learning and Language Thought. New York: Academic Press. 185–214.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter
2011 Sociolinguistic typology: social determinants of linguistics complexity. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Valdman, Albert
2015 Haitian Creole: Structure, Variation, Status, Origin. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing.Google Scholar
Velde, Freek van de
2012 PP extraction and extraposition in Functional Discourse Grammar, Language Sciences 34. 433–454. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
[ p. 252 ]