The Upper Guinea origins of Papiamentu

This paper deals with the linguistic and historical relationships between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea Creole as spoken on the Santiago island of Cape Verde and in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance. In the linguistic section, the hypothesis that Papiamentu is a relexified offshoot of an early Upper Guinea Creole variety is lent support by focusing on the structural correspondences of the function words in five grammatical categories (pronouns, question words, prepositions, conjunctions and reciprocity and reflexivity). In addition, salient data from several early (18th and 19th century) Papiamentu texts is presented. The historical section provides a framework that accounts for the linguistic transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao in the second half of the 17th century

WH-Constructions in Cape Verdean Creole

This dissertation concerns two types of wh-constructions – interrogative and relative clauses – of Cape Verdean Creole (CVC), a Portuguese-based Creole language spoken on the archipelago of Cape Verde, specifically the variety spoken on Santiago Island, in the coast of West Africa. Chapter 2 focus on some aspects of the syntax of CVC, claiming that the possibilities of S-V inversion are very limited and that verbs stay in Vº, except for the Present tense form of the copula verb e ‘to be’, which is the spell out of the formal feature [Present] of T. It is proposed that CVC exhibits a clause functional structure that is similar to English: [CP [TP [NegP [AspP [VP … ]]]]]. In this chapter, it is also suggested that a non Split-CP, based on the formal features [±D, ±V, ±Q, ±Wh, ±T], correctly accounts for the distribution of the complementizers in CVC. Chapter 3 presents the wh-question formation strategies exhibited by CVC, showing that some of them involve Move, while others do not. Considering CVC data, it is said that the language has two clausal typing processes: an ambiguous complementizer ki ([±Q, ±Wh]), whose checking domain is strictly local; and an unambiguous complementizer Ø ([+Q, +Wh]), whose checking domain is not strictly local. The first one derives fronted wh-questions and the second one accounts for wh-in- -situ. Chapter 4 describes the relativization strategies displayed by CVC, focusing on the fact that PP pied-piping is ruled out and that resumption is possible both inside and outside syntactic islands. It is suggested a revision of Bianchi’s (2002a) head raising analysis for the structure of relative clauses. Chapter 5 discusses the properties of the defective copy strategy ([wh[+PL] … el]) and presents evidence in favor of a distinction between this type of wh-strategy and resumption ([wh[+PL] … es]). It is argued that the language requires an overt pronominal form (3SG) to occur in the complement position of the preposition because CVC types the clause with a complementizer ki [uCat +D] and does not allow for preposition incorporation. The set of formal features of the lower copy is ‘shrinked’, i.e. the features are deleted but not erased, being accessible to PF. This analysis of the defective copy xiv strategy predicts that it only applies to PPs and that it is an autonomous process involving wh-movement, which is distinct from resumption.