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The Ecology of Language Evolution in Latin America: A Haitian Postscript toward a Postcolonial Sequel

Michel Degraff

in Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America

How can studies of language change in Iberian America help us better understand related phenomena in the Caribbean, and vice-versa? I raise some fundamental issues about language contact and its ... More

How can studies of language change in Iberian America help us better understand related phenomena in the Caribbean, and vice-versa? I raise some fundamental issues about language contact and its linguistic, cultural and socio-political consequences in Latin America, alongside challenging questions regarding the relationship between power and the production of knowledge in and about Latin America. These issues conjure up the foundations and politics of Creole studies and of education in Haiti. Here, Haiti serves as a spectacular case study to probe the effects of (neo-)colonialism on language diversification, vitality and endangerment throughout Latin America. Rejecting Creole Exceptionalism (i.e., the dogma that Creole languages are exceptional languages on either developmental or structural grounds), I compare Haitian Creole with its counterparts in continental Latin America, particularly Amerindian languages. This exercise sheds new light on the common socio-historical roots of various myths about Creole and Indigenous languages. I then consider how the past can help us analyze, then deconstruct, some of the racially- and ethnically-based hierarchies in Latin America. I conclude with a plea for a North-South collaboration among linguists and, also, between the latter and educators—collaboration toward social justice through quality education for all in Latin America and beyond.Less

The rise and fall of serial verbs

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

in Serial Verbs

We have identified three scenarios for the emergence of serial verb constructions: clause fusion scenario, whereby serial verbs emerge out of sequences of clauses; the verbal modification scenario, ... More

We have identified three scenarios for the emergence of serial verb constructions: clause fusion scenario, whereby serial verbs emerge out of sequences of clauses; the verbal modification scenario, and the concurrent grammaticalization scenario. The development of serial verbs may correlate with the expansion of analytic structures and the loss of inflectional morphology. Serial verbs in some language families are of fair antiquity. In many instances their emergence can be accounted for by language contact. Serial verbs in Creole languages often reflect the substratum influence of the languages which contributed to their formation. In the course of language history, serial verbs can lose their status as such. Minor components in asymmetrical serial verb constructions become grammatical markers—auxiliaries, or bound morphemes. Symmetrical serial verbs become lexicalized units no longer separable. Serial verbs tend to be acquired by children at an early age.Less

Creolizations in the Caribbean and the Americas

in Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity: Édouard Glissant

Explores the position of the Caribbean in relation to the Americas. There are three kinds of community in both: the indigenous inhabitants (Meso-America); the European migrants (Euro-America); and ... More

Explores the position of the Caribbean in relation to the Americas. There are three kinds of community in both: the indigenous inhabitants (Meso-America); the European migrants (Euro-America); and the descendents of transported African slaves (Neo-America), which is the locus of creolizations, and is the main focus of Glissant’s discussion. Unlike the European migrants, the transported Africans had to invent a new culture, starting with the Creole languages. These were considered inferior by the white population – and for creolization to truly flourish there has to be equality between all the participating communities. One of the main properties of creolization is its unpredictability. The chapter ends with a discussion of the formation of Creole languages.Less

Mixing up Languages in the ‘Tout-monde’

Celia Britton

in Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing

Glissant's essays of the 1990s are dominated by the concept of the ‘Tout-monde’: the world envisaged as a dynamic multiplicity of interacting communities. Communication and thus language(s) assume an ... More

Glissant's essays of the 1990s are dominated by the concept of the ‘Tout-monde’: the world envisaged as a dynamic multiplicity of interacting communities. Communication and thus language(s) assume an important role here, and the view of language expressed in these texts is strikingly different from that of Glissant's earlier work: lack and difficulty are replaced by an abundance of languages, also interacting as their speakers ‘surf’ exuberantly between them. This chapter examines both the ethical and the structural implications of ‘mixing up languages’: the need to protect minority languages and the reconceptualization of language as not a discrete Saussurean langue but a flexible structure (like that of Creole) whose components are interchangeable with those of other languages. It argues that the concept of langage, which has been important throughout Glissant's thought, is expanded in the context of the ‘Tout-monde’ to assume other functions, in particular acting as a bridge between langues; and compares it with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological notion of the parole parlante.Less

Eating their Words: The Consumption of French Caribbean Literature

Celia Britton

in Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing

The economic basis of colonialism is export to the metropolis; in the case of the French Caribbean the exported products, historically, have mainly been types of food. More recently, however, they ... More

The economic basis of colonialism is export to the metropolis; in the case of the French Caribbean the exported products, historically, have mainly been types of food. More recently, however, they have included novels; and this chapter argues that these are marketed as food, and that this is internalized in the texts of the novels themselves - not only their typical themes (e.g., ‘fruity’ female sexuality in Depestre's Hadriana dans tous mes rêves) but also the language in which they are written: the reader is invited to ‘eat their words’. The special ‘saveur’ of Creole and creolized French is heavily promoted as a crucial element of the value of these texts as commodities. This chapter uses Bakhtin's ‘objectified discourse’ to analyse this language whose meaning is less important than its exotic ‘taste’, and Althusser's concept of ideological interpellation to outline a historical shift from France's need to control and assimilate its colonial subjects to its desire to consume their difference as a ‘tasty’ exotic commodity.Less

The settling of a language

Pieter A. M. Seuren

in From Whorf to Montague: Explorations in the Theory of Language

This chapter discusses the fact that natural languages are pieces of social reality. Due to settling, forms of behaviour become ‘standard’ in any given community. The notion of social reality is ... More

This chapter discusses the fact that natural languages are pieces of social reality. Due to settling, forms of behaviour become ‘standard’ in any given community. The notion of social reality is analysed, as well as the open question of how it comes into being, lending a community its ‘identity’. The processes that lead to the identity of any particular language and the maintenance thereof through time, are unclear. Many linguistic features ‘jell’ in arbitrary ways unrelated to culture or functionality, thereby enhancing semantic opacity and increasing learning load. A counterweight to this arbitrariness is that all languages are subject to universal restrictions, as discussed in Chapter 3. Topics discussed are the arbitrary extension of semantic categories, semantic bleaching, auxiliation, choice of perfective tense auxiliaries, truth conditions versus use conditions, forced creolization processes—whereby new (Creole) languages arise within the time span of one generation, as in the case of Sranan (Surinam)—and to ‘the heteromorphy problem’ whereby humans do not all speak in the universal language of semantic form.Less

The origin of language

John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary

in The Major Transitions in Evolution

The past 30 years has witnessed a debate between the holders of two very different views about how humans are able to talk. The behaviourists, following B. F. Skinner, ... More

The past 30 years has witnessed a debate between the holders of two very different views about how humans are able to talk. The behaviourists, following B. F. Skinner, argue that we learn to talk in the same way that we learn any other skill. Children are rewarded when they speak correctly, and reproved when they make mistakes. We can talk, whereas chimpanzees cannot, because we are better at learning: there is nothing special about language. In contrast, Noam Chomsky and his followers have argued that humans have a peculiar competence for language, which is not merely an aspect of their general intelligence. We learn to utter, and to understand, an indefinitely large number of grammatical sentences, and to avoid an even larger number of ungrammatical ones, so we cannot possibly learn which sentences are grammatical by trial and error. Instead, we must learn the rules that generate grammatical sentences. These rules are of great subtlety, so that, although we acquire and apply them, we cannot formulate them explicitly. For example, consider the two following sentences: How do you know who he saw? (1) Who do you know how he saw? (2) How do you know who he saw? Who do you know how he saw? Every speaker of English knows at once that is grammatical, and is not. But what rule tells us this? No-one but a trained linguist would have any idea, any more than a non-biologist would know how the rate of beating of the heart is adjusted to meet changing demands. In section 17.3, we describe a hypothesis about the rule that tells us that is ungrammatical: it is a subtle rule, but as yet no-one has thought up a simpler one. It is hard to believe that we could so painlessly master such rules unless we were genetically predisposed to do so. More generally, it is still beyond the wit of linguists and computer scientists to write a language-translating programme, yet many 5-year-olds know two languages, do not mix them up, and can translate from one to the other. A second reason for thinking that we cannot learn to talk by trial and error lies in the poverty of the input on which a child must rely. After hearing a finite set of utterances, a child learns to generate an indefinitely large number of grammatical sentences. This implies that the child learns rules, and not merely a set of sentences. Less