Cover not available
Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 40:2 (2019) ► pp.202–227

Inheritance, contact, convergence

Pronominal allomorphy in the African English-lexifier Creoles

| The University of Hong Kong
This article provides a comparative analysis of the suppletive allomorphy of two personal pronouns in the five African English-lexifier Creoles (AECs) Krio (Sierra Leone), Pichi (Equatorial Guinea), Ghanaian Pidgin English, Nigerian Pidgin, and Cameroon Pidgin. The alternation of the 3sg object forms =àm (a clitic) and ín (a non-clitic) is conditioned by a tonal obligatory contour principle (ocp), a vowel height ocp, animacy, and focus in different constellations across the five AECs. In addition, an epenthetic /r/ is recruited in four of the AECs to ensure that the ocp is not breached. The analyses suggest that pronominal suppletion in the AECs has been fashioned by processes of change and differentiation typical of geographically extensive language families, such as migration from linguistic homelands, acquisition by non-founder populations, interlectal cross-diffusion, as well as contact and convergence with adstrate, substrate, and superstrate languages.
Keywords: West Africa, Creole, Pidgin English, Spanish, Yoruba, obligatory contour principle, suppletion, epenthesis, object pronoun, tone-conditioned allomorphy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The linguistic ecologies of the African English-lexifier Creoles
  • 3.Tone-conditioned suppletive allomorphy in Pichi
  • 4.Tone-conditioned suppletive allomorphy and epenthesis in Pichi
  • 5.Pronominal suppletion in Krio, GhaP, NigP, and CamP
  • 6.Inheritance, contact and convergence in the differentiation of pronoun suppletion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Glossing conventions and abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 13 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00028.yak
References (72)
References
Ajíbóyè, Ọládiípọ̀, and Douglas Pulleyblank. 2018. “Mọ̀bà Nasal Harmony”. In Gene Buckley, Thera Crane, and Jeff Good, eds. Revealing Structure: Finding Patterns in Grammars and Using Grammatical Patterns to Elucidate Language. A Festschrift to Honor Larry M. Hyman. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Akinlabi, Akinbiyi, and Mark Liberman. 2000. “The Tonal Phonology of Yoruba Clitics”. In Birgit Gerlach and Janet Grizenhout, eds. Clitics in Phonology, Morphology and Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Baker, Philip, and Magnus Huber. 2001. “Atlantic, Pacific, and World-Wide Features in English-Lexicon Contact Languages”. English World-Wide 221: 157–208. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bakker, Peter, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen, and Eeva Sippola. 2017. Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berry, Jack. 1970. “A Note on the Prosodic Structure of Krio”. International Journal of American Linguistics 361: 266–267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bickerton, Derek. 1981. Roots of Language. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers.Google Scholar
Blasi, Damián E., Susanne Maria Michaelis, and Martin Haspelmath. 2017. “Grammars are Robustly Transmitted even during the Emergence of Creole Languages”. Nature Human Behaviour 11: 723–729. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul. 1998. Functional Phonology: Formalizing the Interactions between Articulatory and Perceptual Drives. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics. <[URL]> (accessed April 20, 2018).
Bradshaw, A. T. von S. 1966. “A List of Yoruba Words in Krio”. Sierra Leone Language Review 51: 61–71.Google Scholar
Coomber, Ajayi. 1992. “The New Krio Orthography and Some Unresolved Problems”. In Eldred D. Jones, Karl I. Sandred, and Neville Shrimpton, eds. Reading and Writing Krio. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 15–20.Google Scholar
Criper, Lindsay. 1971. “A Classification of Types of English in Ghana”. Journal of African Languages 101: 6–17.Google Scholar
Criper-Friedman, Lindsay. 1990. “The Tone System of West African Coastal English”. World Englishes 91: 63–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dako, Kari. 2002. “Student Pidgin (SP): The Language of the Educated Male Elite”. Research Review 181: 53–62.Google Scholar
Daval-Markussen, Aymeric, and Peter Bakker. 2011. “A Phylogenetic Networks Approach to the Classification of English-Based Atlantic Creoles”. English World-Wide 321: 115–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Daval-Markussen, Aymeric, Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, and Peter Bakker. 2017. “West African Languages and Creoles Worldwide”. In Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen, and Eeva Sippola, eds. Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 141–174. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Faraclas, Nicholas G. 1996. Nigerian Pidgin. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013. “Nigerian Pidgin”. In Susanne Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber, eds. The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures: English-Based and Dutch-Based Languages. Vol. 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 176–184.Google Scholar
Féral, Carole de. 2001. “Sémantaxe et changement linguistique: Quelques réflexions sur la pronominalisation en pidgin-english (Cameroun et Nigeria)”. In Robert Nicolaï, ed. Leçons d’Afrique. Filiations, rupture et reconstitution de langues. Un hommage à Gabriel Manessy. Louvain: Peeters, 515–525.Google Scholar
Finney, Malcolm Awadajin. 2004. “Tone Assignment on Lexical Items of English and African Origin in Krio”. In Geneviève Escure, and Armin Schwegler, eds. Creoles, Contact and Language Change: Linguistics and Social Implications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 221–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. “Krio”. In Susanne Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber, eds. The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures: English-Based and Dutch-Based Languages. Vol. 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 157–166.Google Scholar
Fon Sing, Guillaume. 2017. “Creoles are Not Typologically Distinct from Non-Creoles”. Language Ecology 11: 44–74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
François, Alexandre. 2012. “The Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity: Egalitarian Multilingualism and Power Imbalance among Northern Vanuatu Languages”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2141: 85–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fyle, Clifford N., and Eldred Durosimi Jones. 1980. A Krio-English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fyle, Margaret Sophia. 1998. “Yoruba Loan Words in Krio: A Study of Language and Culture Change”. MA Thesis, Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos, and Inyang Udofot. 2010. “Word Melodies vs. Pitch Accents: A Perceptual Evaluation of Terracing Contours in British and Nigerian English”. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2010. Chicago, paper 15.Google Scholar
Hancock, Ian F. 1971. “A Study of the Sources and Development of the Lexicon of Sierra Leone Krio”. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of London.Google Scholar
1986. “The Domestic Hypothesis, Diffusion and Componentiality: An Account of Atlantic Anglophone Creole Origins”. In Pieter Muysken, and Norval Smith, eds. Substrata versus Universals in Creole Genesis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 71–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1987. “A Preliminary Classification of Anglophone Atlantic Creoles, with Syntactic Data from Thirty-Three Representative Dialects”. In Glenn G. Gilbert, ed. Pidgin and Creole Languages: Essays in Memory of John Reinecke. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 264–333.Google Scholar
Hualde, José Ignacio, and Pilar Prieto. 2015. “Intonational Variation in Spanish: European and American Varieties”. In Sónia Frota, and Pilar Prieto, eds. Intonational Variation in Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 350–391. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2000. “Restructuring in Vitro? Evidence from Early Krio”. In Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh, and Edgar W. Schneider, eds. Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 275–307.Google Scholar
. 2013. “Ghanaian Pidgin English”. In Susanne Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber, eds. The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures: English-Based and Dutch-Based Languages. Vol. 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 167–175.Google Scholar
Huber, Magnus and Manfred Görlach. 1996. “West African Pidgin English”. English World-Wide 171: 239–258. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leben, William. 1973. “Suprasegmental Phonology”. Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Leben, William Ronald. 1999. “The Status of the ocp in the Theory of Tone”. In Paul François Amon Kotey, ed. New Dimensions in African Linguistics and Languages. Trenton and Asmara: Africa World Press, 1–14.Google Scholar
Lipski, John M. 1992. “Pidgin English Usage in Equatorial Guinea (Fernando Poo)”. English World-Wide 131: 33–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015. “‘Toned-up’ Spanish: Stress → Pitch → Tone(?) in Equatorial Guinea”. In Christina Tortora, Marcel den Dikken, Ignacio L. Montoya, and Teresa O’Neill, eds. Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 233–256.Google Scholar
Lüpke, Friederike, and Mary Chambers. 2010. “Multilingualism and Language Contact in West Africa: Towards a Holistic Perspective”. Journal of Language Contact 31: 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McWhorter, John H. 2005. Defining Creole. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Susanne Maria. 2017. “Avoiding Bias in Comparative Creole Studies: Stratification by Lexifier and Substrate”. Leipzig University and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. <[URL]> (accessed February 18, 2019).
Mufwene, Salikoko S. 1996. “The Founder Principle in Creole Genesis”. Diachronica 131: 83–134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Muysken, Pieter, and Norval Smith, eds. 2015. Surviving the Middle Passage: The West Africa-Surinam Sprachbund. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Myers, Scott P. 1997. “ ocp Effects in Optimality Theory”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 151: 847–892. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nkengasong, Nkemngong. 2016. A Grammar of Cameroonian Pidgin. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Nylander, Dudley K. 1984. “The Relation between the Middle Tone and ‘Empty Category Principle’ Violations in Krio”. Studies in African Linguistics 151: 163–175.Google Scholar
Orgun, Cemil Orhan. 2001. “English r-Insertion in Optimality Theory”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 191: 737–749. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peter, Lothar, and Hans-Georg Wolf. 2007. “A Comparison of the Varieties of West African Pidgin English”. World Englishes 261: 3–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sala, Bonaventura Mbiydzenyuy, and Aloysius Ngefac. 2006. “What’s Happening to Cameroon Pidgin? The Depidginisation Process in Cameroon Pidgin English”. Philologie im Netz 361: 31–43.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. 2003. “The Dynamics of New Englishes: From Identity Construction to Dialect Birth”. Language 791: 233–281. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schröder, Anne. 2013. “Cameroon Pidgin”. In Susanne Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber, eds. The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures: English-Based and Dutch-Based Languages. Vol. 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 185–193.Google Scholar
Sluijs, Robbert van, Margot van den Berg, and Pieter Muysken. 2016. “Exploring Genealogical Blends: The Surinamese Creole Cluster and the Virgin Island Dutch Creole Cluster”. Lingua 1781: 84–103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Norval. 1987. “The Genesis of the Creole Languages of Surinam”. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
. 2015. “Ingredient X: The Shared African Lexical Element in the English-Lexifier Atlantic Creoles, and the Theory of Rapid Creolization”. In Pieter Muysken, and Norval Smith, eds. Surviving the Middle Passage: The West Africa-Surinam Sprachbund. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 67–106.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Keiichiro. 1998. “A Typological Investigation of Dissimilation”. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Arizona.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trousdale, Graeme. 2014. “On the Relationship between Grammaticalization and Constructionalization”. Folia Linguistica: Acta Societatis Linguisticae Europaeae 481: 557–577. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter, and Jean Hannah. 2017 (6th ed.). International English: A Guide to Varieties of English Around the World. London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Velde, Mark L. O. van de. 2008. A Grammar of Eton. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Winford, Donald. 1993. Predication in Caribbean English Creoles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Witzel, Michael. 1999. “Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages”. Mother Tongue (Special Issue): 1–70.Google Scholar
Wohlgemuth, Jan. 2009. A Typology of Verbal Borrowings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wyse, Akintola. 1989. The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretive History. London: Hurst and The International African Institute.Google Scholar
Yakpo, Kofi. 2009. “Complexity Revisited: Pichi (Equatorial Guinea) and Spanish in Contact”. In Nicholas G. Faraclas, and Thomas Klein, eds. Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins. London: Battlebridge, 183–215.Google Scholar
. 2013a. “Wayward Daughter: Language Contact in the Emergence of Pichi (Equatorial Guinea)”. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 341: 275–299. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013b. “Pichi”. In Susanne Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber, eds. The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures: English-Based and Dutch-Based Languages. Vol. 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 194–205.Google Scholar
. 2016. “‘The Only Language we Speak Really Well’. The English Creoles of Equatorial Guinea and West Africa at the Intersection of Language Ideologies and Language Policies”. In Susana Castillo-Rodríguez, and Laura Morgenthaler García, eds. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2391: 211–233. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017b. “Unity in Diversity: The Homogeneity of the Substrate and the Grammar of Space in the African and Caribbean English-Lexifier Creoles”. In Cecilia Cutler, Zvjezdana Vrzic, and Philipp Angermeyer, eds. Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas. In Honor of John V. Singler. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 225–250. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2018. “¿El nacimiento de una lengua afrohispana?: La influencia del español en el idioma criollo inglés de Guinea Ecuatorial”. In Dorothy Odartey-Wellington, ed. Trans-afrohispanismos: Puentes culturales críticos entre África, Latinoamérica y España. Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi, 243–259. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. A grammar of Pichi (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 23). Berlin: Language Science Press. <[URL]> (accessed February 18, 2019).
Yakpo, Kofi, and Guri Bordal Steien. 2017. “Romancing with Tone: Prosodic Systems in Language Contact”. Paper presented at the Summer Conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. University of Tampere.Google Scholar
Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Mufwene, Salikoko S.
2022. Multilingualism and Super-Diversity: Some Historical and Contrastive Perspectives. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 145 ff. DOI logo
Yakpo, Kofi
2020. Sociolinguistic characteristics of the English-lexifier contact languages of West Africa. In Advances in Contact Linguistics [Contact Language Library, 57], ► pp. 62 ff. DOI logo
Yakpo, Kofi
2021. Creole Prosodic Systems Are Areal, Not Simple. Frontiers in Psychology 12 DOI logo
Yakpo, Kofi
2023. Two types of language contact involving English Creoles. English Today 39:1 ► pp. 12 ff. DOI logo
Yakpo, Kofi
2024. Chapter 6. Lost siblings. In Predication in African Languages [Studies in Language Companion Series, 235], ► pp. 154 ff. DOI logo
Perez, Danae & Lena Zipp
2019. On the relevance of voice quality in contact varieties. Language Ecology 3:1 ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Multilingualism. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 27 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.