Karipúna French Creole

Ethnologue considers Karipúna French Creole to be "threatened," with a rating of 6b on the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS).[7] This designation seems generally due to the waning use of KFC as a mother tongue, and the steadily decreasing transmission rate. Anonby notes that Portuguese tends to be the mother tongue for speakers under 60 in the Karipúna community, and Karipúna French Creole is the mother tongue primarily only for speakers over 60. Anonby paraphrases from interviews with speakers, that "although most people understand KFC," a Karipúna speaker "admitted about half of the people in the village of Manga cannot speak it. He said there were no monolingual Karipúna speakers."[3] Speakers of KFC tend to speak it as a second language, first learning Portuguese, and only learning KFC via a three-year Kheuól education primary school programme implemented by CIMI.[6]

Anonby notes that "generally, [Karipúna] people feel that the loss of KFC is not a good thing. They feel nostalgia for the time when they all spoke it. At the same time, people feel very positive about speaking Portuguese." Ferreira likewise confirms this, referencing the "discontent felt by many indigenous leaders" who feel as though the state of education in KFC is not of a sufficient standard to be beneficial for the maintenance of KFC.[6] This program was implemented in the 1980s by CIMI, the Catholic mission, but recently a new modified version of this program, the Projeto Político Pedagógico das Escolas Indígenas Karipúna e Galibi-Marworno, is in the process of being implemented, although the value of the new program in maintaining KFC is unclear.[6] Overall, due to the difficulty in transmitting the language to younger speakers as either a mother tongue or second language, KFC is justifiably in a threatened state.

The majority of rigorous Karipúna linguistic documentation was done in the 1980s, with Tobler (1983), Tobler (1987), Monserrat & Silva (1984) and Picanço (1988). Present-day language documentation agencies (such as Soas, Museu do Índio, Museu Goeldi, and Dobes, amongst others) do not seem to have assisted in the documentation of KFC.

Anonby's A Report on the Creoles of Amapá[3] is the result of a joint study between SIL and the University of the West Indies to "investigate sociolinguistic aspects of the French-lexifier Creole languages spoken in the state of Amapá," albeit not funded by a particular major documentation project.

A series of anthropological analyses of the Karipúna community have been undertaken, especially in light of the Karipúna identity and schooling system. Tassinari and Cohn in 2009 critically evaluated, just like Ferreira,[6] the bilingual education program and demonstrated the caveats in the CIMI-organized three-year educational programme.[13] Ladhams is a well-cited and succinct socio-historical investigation of the Karipúna community's origins, which is generally accepted by anyone writing about KFC ethnography afterwards.[2]

Karipúna French Creole's 22 phonemic consonants are shown in the table below.

Karipúna French Creole's consonants are relatively similar to French, with some exceptions. The palatal nasal stop, /ɲ/, voiced uvular fricative, /ʁ/, and labialized palatal approximant, /ɥ/, or /jʷ/, all of which are present in French, are not in KFC. Furthermore, /t/ and /d/ from French are dentalized in KFC.[10][14] Lastly /h/ is present phonemically in KFC, despite having been lost in French due to historical sound changes.

Karipúna French Creole has 10 phonemic vowels.[14]

Again, compared to French's 17 vowels, KFC is significantly less complicated, losing /ɑ/, /ɛː/, /ə/, /œ/, /œ̃/, /ø/, and /y/.

Nonetheless, the French influence is obvious. Like in French, only the open-mid and open vowels have phonemic nasalized variants. Alleyne and Ferreira note that this is consistent with other French creoles, and evidence for the hypothesis that all (or many) Atlantic French creole languages descended from a common creole ancestor.

The "verbalizing" suffix /-e/ however can coerce some nouns into a verb class.

The "verbalizing" suffix /-e/ however can coerce some nouns into a verb class.

Pronouns in KFC form a two-number and three-case system, which is undergoing a regularizing change by analogy.[4] The /li/ pronoun, and /ka/ tense marker (see below), will elide with an adjacent verb.[10] The KFC lexicon on the whole is greatly derived from French[4] and has undergone a process more morphological agglutination and "article reduction." Ladhams suggests that the Karipúna community is historically composed of "French Guinean Blacks, Chinese, Arabs, and Europeans," although the extent of non-European influence, outside of flora and fauna words, appears to be minimal.[2] Arab and Chinese lexical influence is virtually nonexistent. Thus the generic open class of nouns involves morphologically reducing "la + noun" or "l’ + noun" to a monomorphemic word.[4]

Karipúna French Creole's personal pronouns form a two-number, three-person system as in French, and are shown in the table below.[4][10]

The distinction between subject, direct object, and indirect object pronouns from French is simplified to a set of personal pronouns in KFC, which may occupy both subject and object position.[10]

KFC has a no-case system and retained the nominative form, whereas other French creoles retained the oblique form.[4]

Tobler, and Alleyne and Ferreira, give slightly different accounts of the pronouns, and the table above generally reflects the more recent account. Tobler does not make note of the /to/ and /so/ variants of the 2nd and 3rd person singular pronouns, which Alleyne and Ferreira explain is not present in other French creoles, (346) and is thus presumably an innovative change, by analogy with the 1st person singular /mo/. Similarly, Tobler cites /nu/ as the 1st person plural pronoun, but Alleyne and Ferreira explain that KFC has "regularized" this to /no/. The 2nd and 3rd person plural pronouns are consistent between accounts.

In Alleyne and Ferreira, the bare possessive pronouns and the forms with the /-pa/ suffix are taken as equals. However, Tobler refers to the /-pa/ form as "possessive pronouns," and the bare form as "possessive adjectives." The difference appears to be that the pronominal form can occasionally fill a DP (as English "mine") as well as act as a genitive adjunct to a noun phrase (/u-pa liv/, "your book"[4]), whereas the bare possessive form must be adjunct to the possessed NP.

Alleyne and Ferreira give a simple account of reflexive pronouns by appending the /-kɔ/ suffix,[4] but Tobler's grammar explains the nuance of KFC reflexives. To indicate a reflexive pronoun, KFC uses the bare possessive form in the object position and appends the word "body" (/kɔ/), or the body part affected, as the possessed NP of the pronoun. position (in bold below).

In the case that no body part is affected, KFC can also use /mɛm/ for the emphatic self.[4]

Karipúna French Creole both in historical sound shifts and in present variation has agglutinative morphophonemic changes. As in many French Creole languages, many French calques were glossed into KFC and subsequently agglutinated with a French definite article. Alleyne and Ferreira list four classes, based on the original French determiner.[4]

Some of these classes are open, such as class I, which takes new words loaned from French, while the others are not.[4] The morphological reduction of the French article from these words does not have a consistent result on the syntactic category, despite all being non-proper nouns. Tobler claims that "almost all words are monomorphemic roots" in KFC, and the morphological reanalysis from French loanwords appears to move towards this conformity, as the French article, nor the noun stem, are "never found in isolation."[10]

Morphophonemic shifts also occur in the 3rd-person singular pronoun and the present progressive marker in KFC. In the pre-verbal subject position, /li/ is often reduced to /i-/, and reduced to a verb suffix /-l/ in the post-verbal object position.

The present tense marker /ka/, like /li/, also elides with non-back vowels at the beginning of a preceding verb.

Morphophonemic reanalysis produces agglutination in KFC. Morpheme reanalysis and agglutination of this variety is common in creole languages, especially French-lexified creoles.[15] Amongst French creole languages some of these categories are shared, but others are not, and Alleyne and Ferreira (amongst others) suggest that this may be an effective area of research for understanding the origins and development of French creole languages.[4]

Reduplication is often considered a hallmark of creole language morphology, along with morphological conversion and compounding.[16] Compounding, as above, is present in KFC, and as expected so too is reduplication. Tobler (1983) notes the highly productive reduplication possible in KFC.

Tobler shows that reduplication in possible in a large variety of syntactic and morphological contexts. In all cases it tends to "emphasize the degree or quantity of that which is reduplicated,"[10] which corresponds to the generalized "more of the same meaning."[15]

As seems to be the case with the majority of creole languages, Karipúna French Creole lacks a true passive voice. Papiamento may be the only Atlantic Creole to possess a full passive.[18]

Tobler notes that outside of certain stative clauses, the passive form can’t be used. Utterances are expressed solely in the active form. For example, the phrase "I was bitten by a wasp" must be expressed as "the wasp bit me," as below:

And the expression "all the bananas were eaten" might be expressed in either of the following ways:

With active (c.f. stative) verbs in Karipúna French Creole, the passive form cannot be used. While in (3) the number of arguments has been reduced to only a subject (‘banana’), /hete/ is an intransitive verb typically. In other words, Karipúna French Creole non-stative verbs do not have a valency-reducing form.

As stated before, the vast majority of French creoles lack a passive form. While in some French creole communities a passive form can be used, such as in Haitian French Creole, it doesn’t seem to be considered a part of a creole itself, but rather a French borrowing (Mandaly 2011). Jacobs analyzes another potential source for creole passives, however, suggesting that substratum origins and contact with earlier creole languages likely was the result of the oddly-distributed use of the passive in Papiamento,[17] rather than top-down European-language influence.

Tobler demonstrates how a pseudo-passive can be formed by coercing the verb into a verbal adjective, turning a monotransitive sentence into an intransitive one.

Compared with the active construction:

This kind of construction for the verb is not necessarily a full passive, and can only form strictly stative constructions, using only auxiliary or verb-null copula phrases. Tobler notes "one cannot say, ‘The house was painted by John’; this must be expressed actively as ‘John painted the house’" (Tobler 1983, 54). Clearly in this phrase /pẽtʃihe/ is no longer functioning as a VP in the passive construction, as it cannot take an agentive adjunct (‘by John’).

Interaction with verb stativity appears to be a common feature of Atlantic creole languages, and Winford (1988) looks to creole passivity to discuss the possible West African origins of the passive form.[19] Karipúna French Creole's semi-passive verbal adjective form may, rather than the result of a superstratum French influence, be a construction derived from one of Karipúna's many substratum languages.

Karipúna French Creole does have a causative construction, using the auxiliary verb "make" (/fɛ/), which appears to be a widely productive, valency-increasing form. The "make" auxiliary changes either an intransitive construction into a transitive one, or a transitive to a ditransitive.

It is apparent that there is a valency increase with the introduction of the "make" auxiliary, given that the tense marker "te" is no longer present in the /mo lẽj sɛk/ verbal compliment(s). While KFC can, and often does, use a null tense marker to indicate present completeness for "experience and state" verbs, like /sɛk/, the gloss Tobler provides gives no evidence of a present-complete meaning.[10] Therefore, we analyze this not as an embedded CP complement to /fɛ/, but rather as a valency-increase of the VP /sɛk/ from intransitive to monotransitive.

A similar analysis can be taken to the monotransitive-to-ditransitive use of /fɛ/. Tobler's gloss suggests that the null past complete tense marker that "event and process" verbs take applies to "make," rather than "chop" in the causative construction, and therefore does not represent mere CP-embedding.[10]

Karipúna French Creole's system of tense marking is complex, with "five overt tense markers and another [null] marker."[10] However the meaning of the null tense marker is dependent on the class of verb phrase.

Tobler (1983) distinguishes five classes of verb phrase: Event, Experience, Process, State A, and State B. State A and B are typically copular, comparative, possessive or similar phrases that lack a main verb statement. KFC non-auxiliary verbs fall into the categories of Event, Experience, and Process verbs. Event verbs typically include transitives such as /ale/, "go," and /aʃte/, "buy." Experience and Process verbs, vaguely, characterize intransitive experiences and processes, although Tobler fails to provide specific examples of the distinctions. Tobler does note that Event and Experience verbs take a semantic agent, while Process and State phrases lack one, such that Experience verbs (like /sɔtʃi/, "leave/get out," and /asi/, "sit") could be analyzed as unergatives, and Process verbs (like /bule/, "be burned," and /tõbe/, "fall") as unaccusatives.

Tense marking for sentences in KFC interacts with the class of verb phrase in the sentence. All classes of VP use the /ke/ future tense marker, and /teke/ conditional tense marker.

Exclusive to Event and Process class VPs is the present progressive /ka/ marker, and the past incomplete tense marker /teka/. For event and process verbs, a null tense marker is analyzed as the past complete tense.

For Experience and State class VPs, the past complete tense is marked by the tense marker /te/, whereas the null tense marker is understood as the present progressive tense.

The "conditional tense marker" /teke/ indicates a strictly hypothetical conditional relation ("if S had been, H would have"). The conditional marker /si/ can also be used with other tense markers than /teke/ however, but requires strict correspondence between the markers used. Tobler distinguishes three kinds of conditional constructions, employing distinct uses of the tense markers.[10]

The first conditional, "authentic" construction is used for genuine, specific, events, that haven’t occurred yet. This construction uses the present progressive tense marker /ka/ in the conditional phrase and the future tense marker /ke/ in the result phrase. For example:

The (former) conditional clause in this construction can also drop /ka/, with no apparent semantic change.

The "generalization" conditional construction applies to general rules and principles about the world, using the null tense marker in the conditional phrase and the present progressive /ka/ in the result phrase, as such:

The hypothetical conditional construction translates roughly to "if S had been, H would have," and uses the past complete /te/ marker for the conditional clause, and the conditional /teke/ marker for the main clause. This construction applies strictly to hypothetical situations that might have happened, rather than ones that have habitually (the generalization construction) or may in the future (the "authentic" construction).