Summary Details
| Query: |
Compounding in Creoles
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| Author: | Joseph T. Farquharson | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Morphology
Sociolinguistics |
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| Language Family: |
New English
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| Summary: |
Many months ago (Linguist 13.1329) I posted a question requesting
information on compounding in general and compounding in Creole languages specifically, welcoming info on closely related morphological issues and semantic transparency. The responses I received were extremely helpful and the research is taking new turns that I had not considered before. I would like to thank profusely, the following persons who responded to my question: M.C. van den Berg (MvdB) Ulrich Detges (UD) Miriam Meyerhoff (MM) Stefano Molino (SM) Ingo Plag (IP) Geoff Smith (GS) Puis ten Hacken (PtH) Ghil'ad Zuckermann (GZ) ************************************************************************ Question: There has been little research in the area of compounding (as a word-formation process) in Creole languages. In fact, most of the studies which exist focus on English (Selkirk, Matthews, etc.) I am currently undertaking a study of compound words in Jamaican Creole and I would like to know if anyone out there can lead me to useful sources on compounding in general and with specific reference to Creoles. I am also interested in 'calques', 'semantic transparency', and 'synthetic compounds'. ********************************************************************** GS: There has bee quite a bit done by Peter M?hlh?usler on word structure in Tok Pisin. This is usually described as a pidgin, but it is in fact spoken as a creole by an increasing number of people. You could try: M?hlh?usler, Peter. (1979). Growth and Structure of the Lexicon of New Guinea Pidgin. Pacific Linguistics, C52. Canberra: Australian National University. M?hlh?usler, Peter. (1985j). The lexical system of Tok Pisin. In Wurm & M?hlh?usler (Eds.), (pp. 423-440). Wurm, Stephen A. & M?hlh?usler, P. (Eds.). (1985). Handbook of Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin). Pacific Linguistics, C70. Canberra: Australian National University. I also have a bit in the lexicon chapter in Growing up with Tok Pisin: Contact, creolization and change in Papua New Guinea's national language. London: Battlebridge. ********************************************************************** SM: I read your message in the linguist list, and I was very interested in your topic. For my phd thesis I'm studying compounds in French - which of course is not a creole - but I read a lot on compunding in general. As we both study compounds, we may keep in touch to exchange general information, and if we ever meet in our readings interesting things we could indicate them to each other. I said I was interested in your topic because once I wanted to work on French Guadelupean's Creole, but then I turned to compounding in French. Nevertheless my interest for creoles - even though I don't know almost anything about them - is stile there, and if I could have a view of them from the perspective of comounding it'll be great. ********************************************************************** MM: Both Peter M?hlh?usler and Terry Crowley have written about compounding in Tok Pisin and Bislama (respectively). M?hlh?usler's stuff is in various Pacific Linguistics publications, sometimes under titles that suggest the article is only about syntax (though lots are clearly to do with the lexicon). You'll find them on an LLBA search. Crowley's stuff is in his 1990 book From Beach-la-Mar to Bislama. ************************************************************************ MvdB: You're right that there has been little research in the area of Compounding in creoles. However, the times they are a-changing. Look for example at The work of Lefebvre and Brousseau and others (the book on relexification, published in 1998, chapter 11, check also the references in that chapter) for compounding in Haitian Creole. See also Michel Degraff's recent work (from Language Creation, Language Change 1999 onwards). Last year a great workshop on Creole Morphology and Creole Phonology organized by Prof. Ingo Plag took place in Siegen, Germany (BTW - he is also working on Morphology in creoles). With a bit of luck the proceedings of this workshop will be available at the end of this year. A couple of articles in these proceeding deal with morphology, in particular compounding (so if you have time, and you want to know about the state of the art check them out). Currently I am working on derivational morphology and compounding in 18th century Sranan, a creole language spoken in Surinam. The result of this study will be presented at the SCL conference in Trinidad in August this year - when the time comes I can email you the handout, if you like. I hope this helps, at least you know got some names to search the library databases. If you have any questions, comments etc. please don't hesitate to contact me. I look forward to reading the results of your study! ************************************************************************ GZ: I have conducted some research on MULTISOURCED NEOLOGIZATION in creoles. A very simple example is Jamaican Creole dati ''dirty'' from both English DIRTY and Twi DOTI ''mud, dirty''. Would you please let me know if you are interested in a related article - on PHONO-SEMANTIC MATCHING. Otherwise, you can look at my D.Phil. (in the Bodleian/British Library). For more details on the D.Phil., please see BRIEF PROFILE or RESEARCH INTERESTS in http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~gz208/ *********************************************************************** PtH: Though not specifically on Creole, the following publications may be of interest because they claim to give a general view of what compounding is. ten Hacken, Pius (1999), 'Motivated Tests for Compounding', Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 31:27-58. ten Hacken, Pius (2000), 'Derivation and Compounding', in Booij, Geert; Lehmann, Christian & Mugdan, Joachim (eds.), Morphologie - Morphology: Ein Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung - A Handbook on Inflection and Word Formation, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, p. 349-360. *********************************************************************** IP: The safest thing to do is to download the paper from my homepage (address see below). http://www.uni-siegen.de/~engspra/ *********************************************************************** JTF: How are you? Sorry I took so long to respond to your reply to the question I posted on the LINGUISTLIST. I had exams so I had to focus my attention in that direction. I am willing to share information on compounds and other morphological features in creoles. However, I need to let you know right away that I am not a professional. I have just ended my undergraduate study in Linguistics and Spanish, but I have a great interest in Linguistics. I have come across one hurdle in my research on compounds in Jamaican Creole though. First and foremost it is hard deciding whether we have any synthetic compounds in JC. Yes there are verbal compounds, but for many we do not see the same relation (argument structure) between the two members as we see for example in English compounds [considering that JC is an English-lexifier Creole]. V V bata-bruuz ''to batter'' (leaving marks) ''batter'' + ''bruise'' N V man-angl ''mistreat'' ''man'' + ''handle'' In the first example neither bata nor bruuz is fulfilling the internal or external argument requirement of either of the two verbs. In the second example, it is doubtful as to whether MAN is fulfilling any requirement of the verb ANGL. Also do you have any information on the status of Adverbs and Prepositions in compounds and how you tell them separately from Adjectives and Nouns. In JC there are quite a few compounds which have the word BAK from English ''back''. The trouble is that in English back can be both a Noun and an Adjective. My instructor said since NN compounds are productive then it would be safe to assume that BAK is functioning as a Noun in these compounds. Have you come upon this situation and how did you solve it? If you haven't, is there anyway around just assuming? *********************************************************************** SM: As for our topics, I realize that I didn't still faced the type of problems you talked me about. First, because so far I haven't looked too much at the data, but rather at the theoretical reflexions on compounding; and second because I'm considering only nominal compounds, so I cannot tell you too much about verbs. And finally because I'm workin on French compounds, which are, perhaps, a bit different... However I may try to give you some readings from my bibliography that could be interesting for your purposes: I haven't read all of them, and you probably have already heard about some of them. Moreover, many have a computational perspective which may not be interesting for you; but I send them to you anyway and you can pick up what you need. Beard R. 1996. Head Operations and Head-modifier ordering in nominal compounds. Presentation at 1996 Linguistic Saociety of America Meeting San Diego, California. Bosredon B., Tamba-Mecz 1997, Les pr?positions abstraites en fran?ais, A. Colin, Paris Bouillon, P., K. Bosefeldt and G. Russel 1992. Compounds nouns in a unification based MT system. In the proceedings of the Third conference on applied natural language Processing, pp. 209-215. Trento, Italy Busa F. 1996 Compositionality and semantics of Nominals. Phd Thesis. Bradeis University. Busa F. and M. Johnston 1996. Cross-linguistic semantics for complex nominals in the generative lexicon. In the proceedings of the AISB workshop on multinlinguality in the Lexicon. University of Sussex, Brighton, England, April 1996 Di Sciullo, A.-M. et A. Ralli 1995. ''Argument Structure and Compounds. Some Differences Between English, Italian and Greek''. In Aspects multilingues de la composition nominale. Universit? de Gen?ve. Pp. 75-87. (En collaboration avec Angela Ralli) Downing P. 1977. On the creation and Use of English compound nouns. Language 53, pp.810-842 Downing P. A., 1970, Pragmatic constraints on nominal compounding in English, Berkeley Finin T.W. 1980 The semantic interpretation of Coumound Nominals. Phd Thesis University of Illinois at Urrbana-Champain Gross G, 1996, Les Expressions fig?es en fran?ais: noms composes et autres locutions, Paris. Isabelle p. 1984, Another Look at nominal compounds. In the proceedings of the 10ths international conference on Computational linguistics and the 22nd meeting of the ACL, 509-516 Johnston M., B. Bougraev and J. Pustejovsky 1995. The acquisition and interpretation of complex nominal Jones B. 1995 Nominal compounds and lexical rules. Working notes of the Acquilex Workshop on Lexical Rules. Cambridge , England, August 1995 Lees R. 1970. Problems in the grammatical analysis of English nominal compounds. In Bierwisch and Heidolph (eds) Progress in linguistics. The Ague, Mouton. Levi J., (1978), The syntax and semantics of complex nominals, Academic Press, New York. Warren B. (1978), Semantic patterns of Noun- Noun compounds, Gothenburg Studies in English, n?41, Goteborg CHOUL (Jean-Claude), 1990 : ''T?l?scopage syntagmatique : ?conomie de la composition nominale'', dans Revue qu?b?coise de linguistique th?orique _____________________________________ Joseph T. Farquharson, BA Hon. (UWI) Graduate Student Sidney Sussex College University of Cambridge Cambridge CB2 3HU United Kingdom jtf25@cam.ac.uk Subject Language(s): Jamaican Creole English (Language Code: JAM) |
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| LL Issue: | 14.958 | |
| Date Posted: | 25-Mar-2003 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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