Relabeling In Language Genesis

"This book presents a coherent picture of the progress that has been made in research on relabeling over the last 15 years"--

This book is about the functional categories of three Caribbean creoles: Saramaccan, Haitian Creole and Papiamentu with two specific goals. The first one is to evaluate the respective contribution of the source languages to the functional categories of these three creoles. The second is to evaluate the degree of similarity/dissimilarity of the functional categories across these creoles. This study is cast within the relabeling-based account of creole genesis. Several lexical items discussed in this book may fulfill more than one grammatical function thus raising the issue of multifuctionality. No such in-depth comparative work of these three creoles with their source languages and of the three creoles among themselves is available elsewhere in the literature. This book is addressed to linguists (including Master and PhD students) interested in syntactic categories and more specifically in functional categories, to creolists and to researchers interested in language contact.

The studies in Language Change in Contact Languages showcase the contributions that the study of contact language varieties make to the understanding of phenomena such as relexification, transfer, reanalysis, grammaticalization, prosodic variation and the development of prosodic systems. Four of the studies deal with morphosyntactic issues while the other three address questions of prosody. The studies include data from the Atlantic creoles (Saramaccan, Sranan, Haitian Creole, Jamaican Creole, Trinidadian Creole, Papiamentu), as well as Singapore English. This volume, originally published as special issue of Studies in Language 33:2 (2009), aims to make the work of several language contact experts available to a wider audience. The studies will be of use to any student or scholar interested in different approaches to contact-induced language processes, particularly as they relate to morphosyntax and prosody.

The question of how language emerged is one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in science. In recent years, a strong resurgence of interest in the emergence of language from an evolutionary perspective has been helped by the convergence of approaches, methods, and ideas from several disciplines. The selection of contributions in this volume highlight scenarios of language origin and the prerequisites for a faculty of language based on biological, historical, social, cultural, and paleontological forays into the conditions that brought forth and favored language emergence, augmented by insights from sister disciplines. The chapters all reflect new speculation, discoveries and more refined research methods leading to a more focused understanding of the range of possibilities and how we might choose among them. There is much that we do not yet know, but the outlines of the path ahead are ever clearer.

Egypt in the early Byzantine period was a bilingual country where Greek and Egyptian (Coptic) were used alongside each other. Historical studies along with linguistic studies of the phonology and lexicon of early Byzantine Greek in Egypt testify to this situation. In order to describe the linguistic traces that the language-contact situation left behind in individuals' linguistic output, Coptic Interference in the Syntax of Greek Letters from Egypt analyses the syntax of early Byzantine Greek texts from Egypt. The primary object of interest is bilingual interference in the syntax of verbs, adverbial phrases, clause linkage as well as in semi-formulaic expressions and formulaic frames. The study is based on a corpus of Greek and Coptic private letters on papyrus, which date from the fourth to mid-seventh centuries, originate from Egypt and belong to bilingual, Greek-Coptic, papyrus archives.