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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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Transparency
    • 2.1Functional Discourse Grammar
    • 2.2Transparency in FDG
    • 2.3Transparency and creoles
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Redundancy
      • 3.1.1Clausal Agreement and Cross-Reference
      • 3.1.2Phrasal agreement
      • 3.1.3Concord
      • 3.1.4Tense copying
    • 3.2Discontinuity
      • 3.2.1Extraposition and/or Extraction
      • 3.2.2Raising
      • 3.2.3Circumfixes and circumpositions
      • 3.2.4Infixes
      • 3.2.5Non-parallel alignment
    • 3.3Fusion
      • 3.3.1Cumulation of TAME and case
      • 3.3.2Morphologically conditioned stem alternation: Suppletion
      • 3.3.3Morphologically conditioned stem alternation: Irregular stem formation
    • 3.4Form-based form
      • 3.4.1Grammatical gender
      • 3.4.2Syntactic alignment
      • 3.4.3Nominal expletives
      • 3.4.4Influence of complexity in word order or heavy shift
      • 3.4.5Predominantly head marking
      • 3.4.6Morphophonologically conditioned stem alternation
      • 3.4.7Morpho(phono)logically conditioned affix alternation or conjugation and declension
    • 3.5Summary of all transparency features
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Redundancy
    • 4.2Discontinuity
    • 4.3Fusion
    • 4.4Form-based form
    • 4.5Summary
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00060.seg
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