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Part of
Perspectives on Historical Syntax
Edited by Carlotta Viti
[Studies in Language Companion Series 169] 2015
► pp. 291–316

The Gulf of Guinea creoles

A case-study of syntactic reconstruction

| University of Lisbon

This paper argues that creole languages do not face some of the typical problems that have been discussed with respect to syntactic reconstruction of older languages. Creoles often belong to young language families and are therefore expected to show a significant amount of syntactic identity among sister languages. Other factors, such as their isolating typology and geographical isolation, may be additional advantages in the success of syntactic reconstruction. This hypothesis is tested on the four Portuguese-related Gulf of Guinea creoles, where a high degree of identity and the use of other processes, such as directionality, prove to provide good insights into the syntactic features of the proto-language.

Keywords: creolization, directionality, Gulf of Guinea creoles, reconstruction, syntax
Published online: 29 April 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.169.12hag
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