Substrate and Adstrate: The Origins of Spatial Semantics in West African Pidgincreoles 9781614514626, 9781614516200

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Micah Corum Substrate and Adstrate

Language Contact and Bilingualism

Editor Yaron Matras

Volume 10

Micah Corum

Substrate and Adstrate The Origins of Spatial Semantics in West African Pidgincreoles

ISBN 978-1-61451-620-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-462-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0091-6 ISSN 2190-698X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Berlin/Boston Cover image: Anette Linnea Rasmus/Fotolia Typesetting: Compuscript Ltd., Shannon, Ireland Printing and binding: CPI Books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents List of tables     xi List of figures     xii Acknowledgments     xiii Abbreviations     xiv  1 Introduction  Definitions and theoretical preliminaries 1 Contact languages in pidgincreole contexts 2 Adstrate, substrate, lexifier 6 Advances in the substrate camp 8 Treatment of adstrates 13 Linguistic areas, convergence, and (pidgin)creoles 16 Congruence in a typological matrix and convergence in location marking 18 Outline and content of the case studies 21 Locative structures and constructional pairings 22 Chapter 1 Spatial semantics in West African pidgincreoles 25 Introduction 1 25 A general overview of Krio, Nigerian Pidgin, and 1.1 Ghanaian Pidgin English 25 1.1.1 Krio 26 Locative structures in Krio 1.1.1.1 29 1.1.2 Nigerian Pidgin 29 1.1.2.1 Locative structures in Nigerian Pidgin 30 1.1.3 Ghanaian Pidgin English 31 1.1.3.1 Locative structures in Ghanaian Pidgin English 32 1.1.3.2 Ghanaian Student Pidgin 32 1.2 Remarks on the diachrony of the locative copula de 34 1.3 Methodologies for the study of spatial semantics in West African pidgincreoles 36 Chapter 2 Locative predication in Guinea Coast languages: a survey of features in the West African (Pidgin)Creoles’ extended typological matrix 41 2 Introduction 41 2.1 Locative predication 42

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Spatial grams: or spatial-relational items, adpositions, and affixes 42 2.1.2 A general impression of spatial grams in Niger-Congo languages 43 2.1.3 Multiple meaning-function constructions 46 2.2 Upper Guinea Coast languages and the provenance of locative predication in West African (pidgin)creoles 47 2.2.1 Atlantic languages of the Guinea Coast and the immediate hinterland 49 2.2.1.1 Wolof, Serer, Fula (Pulaar) 50 2.2.1.2 The BAK group: Dyola, Pepel-Mandyak, Balanta 52 2.2.1.3 Banyun, Biafada, Bidyogo 54 2.2.1.4 The Sapi group of Mel languages: Landuma, Baga, Temne, Gola, Bullom 55 2.2.2 Mande languages of the Guinea Coast and the immediate hinterland 61 2.2.2.1 Manding, Vai, Susu 61 2.2.2.2 Mende and Liberian Kpelle 64 2.2.3 Kru languages of the Guinea Coast and the immediate hinterland 65 2.2.3.1 Klao and Grebo 65 2.2.4 Dominant features of locative predication in languages of the Upper Guinea Coast 67 2.3 Languages of the Lower Guinea Coast and the hinterland: Benue-Kwa and Ijoid 68 2.3.1 The Kwa group 69 2.3.1.1 Akan dialect cluster, Awutu, Nzema 69 2.3.1.2 Ga and Adangme 73 2.3.1.3 Ewe 74 2.3.2 The Benue-Congo group 75 2.3.2.1 Yoruboid 75 2.3.2.2 Edoid 76 2.3.2.3 Igboid 78 2.3.2.4 Cross River 79 2.3.2.5 Bantoid 80 2.3.3 The Ijoid group 80 2.3.4 Dominant features of locative predication in languages of the Lower Guinea Coast 81 2.4 West African pidgincreoles and their creole kin 83

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Lingua de Preto, a linguistic foundation for West African Portuguese-lexifier creoles 83 2.4.1.1 Early Portuguese-lexifier pidgin in West Africa 84 2.4.2 Guinea-Bissau Creole and Cape Verdean Creole 85 2.4.3 Early West African English-lexifier creole, or Guinea Coast Creole English 85 2.4.4 Afro-Caribbean 87 2.4.5 Jamaican Maroon Spirit Language 88 2.4.6 Krio 90 2.4.7 Early West African English-lexifier pidgin and present-day pidgincreoles 91 2.4.8 Summary 93 2.4.1

Chapter 3 Topological spatial relations in Ghanaian Student Pidgin: an exercise in semantic typology in a West African pidgincreole context 97 3 Introduction 97 3.1 Tools to study the BLC 97 3.2 Specialized terminology in the literature on spatial language 99 3.3 Schematizing the TRPS 101 3.4 Research in semantic typology and what it means for pidgin and creole studies 103 3.4.1 Acquisition of spatial semantics 104 3.4.2 Orthodox assumptions about spatial language 106 3.4.3 BLC hierarchy 108 3.4.4 Typology of locative predication 110 3.4.5 Data collection and research questions 112 3.5 Spatial grams in Ghanaian Student Pidgin 113 3.5.1 Research question 1: Which spatial grams are used to encode search domain information in Ghanaian Student Pidgin? 114 3.5.2 Observations on the possessive character of nominal-derived spatial grams 116 3.5.3 Im body 117 3.5.4 Prenominal spatial grams in Ghanaian Student Pidgin 119 3.6 The BLC in Ghanaian Student Pidgin 120 3.6.1 Research question 2: Which linguistic sources have the greatest influence on the expression of locative predication in Ghanaian Student Pidgin? 123

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3.6.1.1 3.6.1.2 3.6.1.3 3.6.1.4 3.6.1.5 3.6.1.6 3.6.2

Situation I: Piercing 124 Situation II: Firm attachment 125 Situation III: Negative space 127 Situation IV: Part-whole 128 Situation V: Clothing and adornment 130 Situation VI: Movable objects 130 Extensional range of im body and (im) top in Ghanaian Student Pidgin 132 3.6.2.1 Im body and corresponding spatial grams in Twi and English 134 3.6.2.2 (Im) top and corresponding spatial grams in Twi and English 135 3.6.3 Variation in locative predication in Ghanaian Student Pidgin 136 3.6.3.1 Adornment scenes 136 3.6.3.2 Part-whole scenes 137 3.6.3.3 Attachment scenes 138 3.6.3.4 Piercing scenes 138 3.7 Uses of the general spatial gram for in Ghanaian Student Pidgin 140 3.7.1 Research question 3: What motivates or constrains the use of for in locative descriptions in Ghanaian Student Pidgin? 141 3.7.2 Distribution of for in the TRPS data 141 3.8 Summary 144 Chapter 4 Meanings and functions of for in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English 147 4 Introduction 147 4.1 The multiple meaning-function construction in West African pidgincreoles 148 4.2 Cognitive semantics for creolistics 151 4.2.1 Linguistic categorization 151 4.2.2 Image schemas 153 4.2.3 Summary 154 4.3 Spatial image schemas and for 155 4.3.1 MMFCs and Benue-Kwa and Ijoid languages 157 4.4 Scalar: SOURCE-PATH-GOAL and for 160 4.5 Unity-multiplicity: LINK, MERGING, PART-WHOLE, and for 162 4.5.1 Instrumental 162 4.5.2 Comitative 163

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Different uses of for in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English: a focus on de for 164 4.6.1 Deconstructing de for in written and spoken Nigerian Pidgin 165 4.6.2 Methodology 166 4.6.3 Findings in the spoken and written Nigerian Pidgin data 166 4.6.4 De for in the description of topological spatial relations in Nigerian Pidgin 169 4.6.5 Findings in the TRPS Nigerian Pidgin data 170 4.6.6 Constructions similar to de for in English-lexifier creoles 171

4.6

Chapter 5 Sources of locative for in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English 5 Introduction 173 5.1 On for and similar constructions in Atlantic creoles 173 5.2 The Portuguese-lexifier creole component 176 5.2.1 Guinea Coast contributions to the general spatial gram na 5.3 The Guinea Coast component: general spatial gram as areal feature 180 5.3.1 Upper Guinea languages 180 5.3.2 Lower Guinea languages 183 5.4 Where did for come from? 186 5.4.1 The European component 187 5.4.2 Sociétés de cohabitation and the Gold Coast entrepôt at Elmina 190 5.5 Akan locatives in the emergence of for 193 5.5.1 Locative wɔ in the Akan dialect cluster 194 5.6 Summary 199 Chapter 6 Concluding remarks 201 6 Overview 201 6.1 Features of locative predication acquired from Guinea Coast languages 202 6.1.1 A note on de and possessive constructions in Akan 203 6.2 Semantic typology and the study of West African pidgincreoles 204 6.2.1 Issues with the stimulus; answers from the pidgincreole data 205 6.2.2 Future exercises in semantic typology in the (pidgin) creole context 207

173

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6.3 6.3.1 6.4

Cognitive semantics meets creole linguistics 209 A corpus linguistic study of de for 209 Arenas of language contact and the actors who shape contact languages 210 6.5 Conclusion 214 6.5.1 Domestic origins of spatial semantics in West African pidgincreoles 215 References Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 Index 275

219 247 249 251 267

List of tables     Tab. 1: Questions and responses from TRPS-1 in English, Ghanaian Student Pidgin, and Akan   Tab. 2: Copulas favored in various syntactic environments in six Creoles and one African language   Tab. 3: Nominal-derived spatial grams in Ghanaian Student Pidgin   Tab. 4: Prenominal spatial grams in Ghanaian Student Pidgin    Tab. 5: BLCs and competing constructions   Tab. 6: Extensional range of spatial grams in GSP, Twi, and English    Tab. 7: BLC situation type and the use of for in Ghanaian Student Pidgin     Tab. 8: Contingency table of observed frequencies of for in BLC situation type VI     Tab. 9: Contingency table of observed frequencies of for in BLC situation type II   Tab. 10: Contingency table of observed frequencies of for in the BLC   Tab. 11: Trajectors in the de for data   Tab. 12: Landmarks in the de for data   Tab. 13: Image schemas and de for in the spoken and written Nigerian Pidgin data  Tab. 14: Spatial grams in the elicited TRPS Nigerian Pidgin Data   Tab. 15: Distribution of de for in the TRPS Nigerian Pidgin data  Tab. 16: Locative structures in Lower Guinea Coastal languages    Tab. 17: General spatial grams in Upper Guinea Coast Languages  Tab. 18: Locative structures used for possessive functions  Tab. A1: Entry 137 in Thomas’ (1916) Specimens of Languages Tab. A2: Entry 144 in Thomas’ (1916) Specimens of Languages

List of figures    Fig. 1: Continuum of the degree of fusion of spatial grams. Adapted from Svorou (1994: 35).    Fig. 2: Coastmarks and linguistic regions: Fula to Susu. Taken from Hair’s grouping of “ethnolinguistic units” of the Guinea Coast (1967: 267).    Fig. 3: Coastmarks and linguistic regions: Temne to Grebo. Taken from Hair’s ­grouping of “ethnolinguistic units” of the Guinea Coast (1967: 267).   Fig. 4: Coastmarks and linguistic regions: Akan to Ewe. Taken from Hair’s ­grouping of “ethnolinguistic units” of the Guinea Coast (1967: 267).    Fig. 5: Coastmarks and linguistic regions: Yoruba to Duala. Taken from Hair’s ­grouping of “ethnolinguistic units” of the Guinea Coast (1967: 267).   Fig. 6: Cline of grammaticalization of na in Engenni and Igbo.    Fig. 7: Selection of images from Topological Relations Picture Series.   Fig. 8: Spatial schemas in the TRPS.   Fig. 9: Development of one spatial gram into two spatial grams. Item X is first used to describe on, over, on-top, and attachment scenes, but eventually loses one of its meanings to another spatial gram Y. There are two trajectories of this sort. Trajectory A contains a spatial gram X that describes on, on-top, and attachment scenes, and spatial gram Y is used for over scenes. Trajectory B loses its attachment description to a new spatial gram Y.  Fig. 10: BLC hierarchy.   Fig. 11: Typology of locative predication.  Fig. 12: TRPS-25, telephone on a wall; TRPS-44, portrait on a wall.  Fig. 13: BLCs and their preferred NSGs in Ghanaian Student Pidgin.  Fig. 14: TRPS-22, papers on a pin; TRPS-70, apple on a skewer.  Fig. 15: TRPS-20, balloon on a stick.  Fig. 16: TRPS-18, hole in a towel; and TRPS-26, crack in a cup.   Fig. 17: TRPS-41, leaves on a branch; TRPS-45, apples in a tree.  Fig. 18: TRPS-5, hat on a head; TRPS-21, shoe on a foot; and TRPS-69, earring in an ear.  Fig. 19: TRPS-1, cup on a table; TRPS-36, cloud over a mountain; TRPS-58, ladder on a wall. Fig. 20: Early settlements along the Upper and Lower Guinea Coasts. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlements indicated with . Taken from Hancock (1986: 89).  Fig. 21: Implicational hierarchy for spatial grams as described by Bowerman and Pederson (1992). Fig. A1: Reproduction of the Topological Relations Picture Series.

Acknowledgments This research is the result of a project that was carried out over three years as part of a state-sponsored initiative on multilingualism in Hamburg called Linguistic Diversity Management in Urban Areas, or LiMA. While at LiMA, I was enrolled in the Department of English and American Studies at Hamburg University. I thank my Doktorvater Prof. Dr. Peter Siemund for giving me the opportunity to work with professors and students at LiMA’s interdisciplinary research institute from 2010 to 2013 and for funding the trips that I took to do fieldwork in Ghana and to present my research at international conferences. To my teacher Nicholas Faraclas: À salut o. Thank you again and again. I also thank participants from the Twi-, Nigerian Pidgin-, and Ghanaian Student Pidgin-speaking communities in Hamburg and Accra for providing me with rich data. Also, I could not have completed my work without the assistance of ­Professor Kari Dako of the English Department at University of Ghana in Legon. Thank you for helping me to organize my second trip to conduct fieldwork on campus and providing me the opportunity to present my research to faculty and students there. A warm thanks to Kwaku Osei-Tutu, Vida Asante, Richard Bonnie, Nana Kofi Appiah-Badu, and Sampson Duodu for helping me find many of the p ­ articipants that I interviewed in 2012. I am grateful to Anatol Stefanowitsch for his guidance at early stages of my project. Also, James Essegbey, Shelli Feist, Presley Ifukor, Bart Jacobs, Edward Mitchell, Thorsten Klinger, Hagen Peukert, Simone Lechner, Florian Dolberg, Martin Schweinberger, Georg Maier, Margot van den Berg, and Donald Winford provided suggestions on content and style that greatly improved the quality of the monograph. Finally, I celebrate this achievement with my wife Ambar, who shared that long and beautiful experience with me in Germany.

Abbreviations 1 first person 2 second person 3 third person basic locative construction BLC COMPL completive COP copula DET determiner INC incompletive LM landmark LOC locative MMFC multiple meaning-function construction NEG negative noun phrase NP NSG nominal-derived spatial gram OBJ object PL plural POSS possessive PSPV Picture Series for Positional Verbs SBJ subject SG singular TR trajector TRPS Topological Relations Picture Series Ø null

Introduction Definitions and theoretical preliminaries Various frameworks have been applied to the study of pidgins and creoles, from generative grammar (Bailey 1966; Muysken 1981; Degraff 1999, 2001) and construction grammar (Essegbey and Ameka 2007; Lefebvre and Lambert-Bretière 2012) to linguistic typology (Bakker et al. 2011; Lefebvre 2011) and language ecology (Mühlhäusler 1989, 2011; Mufwene 2001; Ansaldo 2009). These works have contributed theoretical and practical insights into the nature of human communicative strategies in the formation of contact languages. Although there is disagreement about which approach allows for the best account of the genesis, development, and present structure of pidgins and creoles, the common ground that creolists share regardless of their theoretical orientation is that speakers of pidgins and creoles have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate a high degree of resourcefulness and creativity in the (re)construction of languages in plurilingual and culturally heterogeneous contact settings like Caribbean sugar plantations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, urban areas of Honolulu in the early twentieth century, and educational institutions in Ghana and Nigeria today. Aspects of the Hawai‘ian and Caribbean contact settings mentioned above were compared in Corum (2008). In that work, I explored the role that marginalized laboring peoples played in the diffusion of features between pidgin- and creole-speaking networks in the Atlantic and Pacific. The present work turns to the urban campus setting with an examination of spatial semantics in Ghanaian Student Pidgin. Other chapters in this book bring to light the hybrid nature of contact settings on the Guinea Coast where the first forms of Portuguese- and English-lexifier varieties emerged. As a whole, the case studies in this work underscore an African contribution to the linguistic expression of space in those languages. Before moving further, it is important to discuss characteristics of d ­ ifferent forms of contact languages that have been used in West African contexts, such as pidgins, creoles, pidgincreoles, and mixed languages. The varieties of N ­ igerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English that are considered in this work have ­occupied different dimensions on the continuum of contact languages, and speakers will undoubtedly continue to adjust the languages’ forms and functions as their linguistic ecologies shift and transform.

2 

 Introduction

Contact languages in pidgincreole contexts According to Bakker and Matras (2013: 2), contact languages like pidgins, pidgincreoles, creoles, and mixed languages are relatively new varieties whose linguistic shapes reflect the composite of their multiple histories and linguistic ancestral ties. Those contact languages can be distinguished from each other based on structural and sociolinguistic criteria. The classic view in creolistics concerning the pidgin-creole divide maintains that a pidgin serves a limited functional role in communication between two or more ethnic groups and is not characterized as a mother tongue of any speech community. A creole, meanwhile, is the first language of a speech community and serves as a “medium of community solidarity” (Baker 2000). Pidgincreole is an intermediate class of contact language that falls between the categories pidgin and creole. In terms of structure, pidgincreoles are similar to creoles. Even on sociolinguistic grounds, pidgincreoles are only vaguely distinguishable from creoles or semi-creoles, that is, partially restructured vernaculars (Holm 2003). The term pidgincreole was established as an alternative to the more commonly used terms expanded pidgin or extended pidgin: A pidgincreole is a former pidgin that has become the main language of a speech community and/or a mother tongue for some of its speakers. Pidgincreoles are not creoles, because they are not the language of an ethnic or political group or the mother tongue for the whole community. (Bakker 2008: 131)

The pidgincreoles in West Africa that have English-based lexicons, such as Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English (referred to hereafter as West African pidgincreoles), are part of a dialect cluster belonging to Afro-Atlantic English-lexifier creole. In this work, the term pidgin precedes the term creole in parentheses, as in (pidgin)creole, in reference to a large group of those contact languages that include pidgincreoles and creoles. In the literature on contact languages, the term mixed language is sometimes used synonymously with intertwined language. Meakins provides a list of wellknown and extensively studied mixed languages (2013: 161–164). Media Lengua and Michif have probably received the most attention in the literature on mixed languages, with Angloromani and Sri Lanka Malay following closely in recent years. In those documented cases, linguists found that bilingual speakers mixed aspects of their first language with aspects of their second language. There are cases of a Romani lexicon overlaying an English frame, as in Angloromani, or English lexical items and content morphemes inserted into Navajo grammar, as in Bilingual Navajo. Indeed, there may be some interesting similarities in



Definitions and theoretical preliminaries  

 3

the Bilingual Navajo situation or the Gurindji Kriol/Light Walpiri situation that Meakins discusses (2013: 167–168, 174–176) with the Ghanaian Student Pidgin situation described in chapter 3 of the present work (see section 1.1.3 for an overview of this contact variety). Ghanaian Student Pidgin speakers draw on a lexical reservoir of mostly English for their mixed-code language (Osei-Tutu and Corum 2013), but the grammatical frame is modeled on both West African pidgincreole and (New) Kwa languages like Twi, Ga, and Ewe, referred to in this work generally as Kwa. Locative copulas and serialized verb constructions that convey resultative meanings, for instance, are modeled on both the (pidgin)creole frame and the Kwa frame, whereas uses of postnominal spatial-relational items are modeled only on the Kwa frame. I provide dozens of linguistic examples and an extensive discussion in chapter 3 to support this assertion. The students’ mixed-code language is occasionally referred to as a pidgincreole since it is derived from preexisting Ghanaian Pidgin English. Pidgincreoles are not representative of typical pidgins, like Basque-based pidgins or Carib Pidgin, which were native to no one and were used only in limited social domains (Parkvall and Bakker 2013: 22). However, early accounts of restructured English on the Gold Coast did suggest a pidgin situation. Although those pidgins were makeshift contact varieties that were used as lingua francas, they still constituted norm-based languages. Their speakers drew on two or more linguistic sources for lexical and grammatical substance; however, on the surface, the language that contributed lexical content was seemingly the more dominant source of input. In general, many structural features do not enter a pidgin’s grammar, and consequently, there is either zero marking or there are lexical forms that assume the grammatical functions of structural features that have been lost in pidgin formation. Expansion in morphological marking generally occurs in a (pidgin)creole when there is increased use of a grammatical morpheme to express meanings that were not expressed in the pidgin (Siegel 2008: 56–62). One sees in Tok Pisin, for instance, the grammatical morpheme bai is used to express future/ realis where its predecessor had used a lexical combination by and by or zero marking. A cline of reduction has been introduced to characterize either retention or  loss in pidgin morphology, with its extreme ends representing cases of full retention and full loss (Roberts and Bresnan 2008). The reduction generally results in a change toward an analytic type of contact language. Parkvall and Bakker provide a discussion of features that are typically absent in the majority of the known cases of pidgins (2013: 39–46): these include inflectional marking for case, gender, number, definiteness, tense-mood-aspect, valence, and poli­ teness. Some pidgins are situated in the partial retention of morphology space of Roberts and Bresnan’s cline. For those pidgins, we can make generalizations

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 Introduction

about the kind of morphology that has been retained. Based on the findings in the pidgin data set available to date, Bakker (2003: 23) established a hierarchy for retentions of nominal (n) and verbal (v) morphology in pidgins: (n) if a pidgin inflects nominal forms to indicate gender, it has also preserved inflection for case or number, or possibly both; (v) if a pidgin inflects verbs to indicate gender, it has also preserved inflection for person, number, valence, or tense-moodaspect, respectively. In summary, a pidgin is impoverished in terms of its inflectional and derivational morphology, or at least the number of inflected forms is extremely reduced compared with its input languages. But, compared with (pidgin)creoles, Bakker makes the following statement: “Pidgins preserve more inflectional morphology than creoles do. Pidgins also appear to preserve more suppletive forms than creoles do – even though these remain marginal” (2003: 23). The key argument here is that pidgins and (pidgin)creoles show less morphological complexity than their respective input languages. It follows that speakers of languages that are rich in morphology are likely to produce pidgins that have some morphological complexity, whereas speakers who have to reconstruct a language like English, which has few inflectional forms, are not likely to supply many morphological forms to an English-based pidgin. Unlike pidgins, (pidgin)creoles generally derive the majority of their lexicons from one source. Their hybrid grammars are the result of complex processes of selection and propagation of features in language contact settings that are marked by specific sociohistorical, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical circumstances (Faraclas et al. 2007b). There are at least three general types of these contact languages: plantation creoles, fort creoles, and maroon creoles. These types of creoles are also framed in terms of exogenous varieties and endogenous varieties (Chaudenson 1977: 274; 2001: 22–23), and they are further distinguished based on the nature of the contact setting in which they formed, settlement colonies versus exploitation colonies (Mufwene 2001: 9, 170–173, 204–206). The scenarios in which maroon creoles developed constitute an additional type of contact setting that is complementary to plantation colonies and homestead settings (Bartens 2013: 67). Ecologies that reflect linguistic diversity and cultural hybridity among non-European majority populations have been discussed for different contact scenarios in the Atlantic and Pacific in Faraclas (2012). These kinds of settings are called sociétés de cohabitation. To a great extent in creolistics research, for example, in the works of Chaudenson and Mufwene above, those societies have been rendered invisible in the Caribbean and elsewhere because of a prevailing focus on European-framed and European-dominated scenarios, that is, contact settings in which European linguistic models were assumed to be the targets and European cultures were assumed to be the standards. Ansaldo (2009: 226; 2010: 622) has distinguished between a majority linguistic Ecology A that is similar in nature to sociétiés de cohabitation

Definitions and theoretical preliminaries  



 5

and a minority linguistic Ecology B that is typical of European-framed and European-dominated scenarios: Ecology A Speakers know more than one variety Society allows mixing Language is transmitted informally Language use is creative

Ecology B Speakers are monolingual Society supports purism Language is transmitted through institutions Language use is normative

Those European-framed and European-dominated settings represent “exotic communicative ecologies in the history of human language evolution” (Ansaldo 2010: 622). In most cases, networks of pluri-identified speakers have been responsible for the emergence and continual restructuring of (pidgin)creoles. Afro-Caribbean contact languages from Suriname to South Carolina make up a dialect cluster of former exogenous plantation creoles. Slaves who were taken from Africa and sent to plantation sites on Caribbean islands and the American continents from the seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century restructured grammars of regional varieties of English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish that had been diffused throughout the maritime Atlantic world. Other Africans came to the Caribbean in later periods as indentured laborers, and they reinforced African-derived features that were already entrenched in those creole grammars, for example, in Trinidad (Warner-Lewis 1997: 50). For an extensive overview of the exogenous creoles known today, see Holm (1989). Endogenous (pidgin)creoles are products of horizontal contact that occurred near former trade settlements in Asia and Africa among groups of women, renegades, and “non-propertied peoples” of African, Asian, and European descent (Faraclas and Viada 2012: 36), including indigenous laboring peoples, mediators, local traders, and European merchants and sailors. The word horizontal is used metaphorically to indicate quasi-equal social relations between the parties in contact, as opposed to a vertical metaphor that supposes hierarchical power ­relations that are created and reserved by a dominant group. Many of those sites have seen the emergence of modern regional varieties of European languages that are now spoken alongside a much older (pidgin)creole, for instance Nigerian English coexists with Nigerian Pidgin. Those (pidgin)creoles are characterized as endogenous because they have remained in contact with their source languages, as Bartens explains (2013: 68): Endogenous creoles … tend to coexist with their adstrate languages, although population movements may turn some of them into substrate languages as the corresponding population group moves out of the area and new adstrates are added as a result of immigration. This can be exemplified by … Guinea Bissau Kriyôl and closely related Casamance Portuguese Creole of Senegal.

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 Introduction

In the Caribbean creole context, Niger-Congo influence is framed in terms of substrate influence, since those African languages impacted the contact varieties in various ways during creole genesis but ceased to be used as full languages by majority creole speakers at some point in the creoles’ histories. As mentioned earlier, the sociolinguistic situations of maroon communities are an exception and, therefore, those contact settings have been depicted as sociétiés de cohabitation in the Caribbean, a characterization not foreign to West African (pidgin)creole contexts. The endogenous English-based contact languages in Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon are good candidates for the term pidgincreole, as they contain features that are considered prototypical of creoles (for an extensive overview of these creole features, see Bartens 2013: 83–136), and linguists have characterized them as “complete natural languages” whose uses extend into various social domains (Parkvall and Bakker 2013: 53; Bakker 2008). In this monograph, I borrow pidgincreole as a reference term for both Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English, while noting again that the label pidgin in Nigerian Pidgin is misleading. Nomenclature has always been a contentious issue in the study of pidgins and creoles. It is linked to processes of marginalization, domination, and control of non-Western peoples, and it normally falls outside the prerogative of persons who speak the languages characterized as brokɛn or patois (Alleyne 2004). Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English are usually considered offshoots of Sierra Leone Krio, which itself has its origins partially in certain AfroCaribbean creoles (Huber 1999a, 1999b: 59–134; Parkvall 2000: 126, 151). The present work is not preoccupied with the extent to which Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English resemble Krio or other creoles of the Afro-Caribbean region in terms of their phonological or tense-mood-aspect systems. Most comparative work in the study of West African (pidgin)creoles has been devoted to those domains. The present research is different in that it is restricted to describing aspects of location marking in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English to make comparisons with location marking in their European lexifier language and substrate and adstrate languages of the West African littoral.

Adstrate, substrate, lexifier The terms adstrate, substrate, and lexifier are conceptualized in a way that is similar to the definitions in the reference works of Crystal (2008) and Kouwenberg and Singler (2008). Adstrate influence entails prolonged coexistence of linguistic systems in a geographical space whose contact leads to extensive borrowing, which causes language pairs or groups to become similar over time. Effects of adstrate influence include polysemy copying (Heine and Kuteva 2005: 100–103)



Definitions and theoretical preliminaries  

 7

and metatypy (Ross 1996, 2007) – also discussed in terms of processes of typological congruence (Ansaldo 2011a) – and may result in the formation of a linguistic area, or sprachbund (see the section below for a discussion of this term). Substrate influence entails linguistic merger, wherein native linguistic systems blend with foreign linguistic systems. Language transfer from a substrate language occurs during a shift toward a new contact variety. Outcomes of adstrate influence also involve language shift, but where substrate differs from adstrate is in the degree of intensity and duration of the languages in contact. Most research on creoles’ substrates has been focused on contact scenarios that involve groups of speakers who were displaced from the areas where their first languages were spoken. Substrate effects include the retention of grammatical, phonological, and semantic features from speakers’ first, second, or third (etc.) languages in a contact variety. According to Crystal (2008), “A substrate language is particularly evidenced when a language is imposed on a community, as a result of political or economic superiority, as can be seen in the many varieties of English spoken throughout the world which incorporate characteristics of a mother-tongue, for example, in India, West Africa” (464). Substrate influence can manifest itself throughout the system of an adopted lexifier, or superstrate language. Superstrate influence entails the absorption of lexical forms and some of their features into a contact variety, including aspects of their phonetic substance, thematic roles, and valency patterns – note, however, that certain valency patterns are retentions from the substrate (Faraclas 1990: 148–149; Winford 1993: 151–154; Michaelis 2008). In substrate camps, it is common to talk about phonological representations of the lexifier that overlay syntactic structural features derived from the substrate. Kouwenberg and Singler conclude, “The term ‘lexifier’ (in place of superstrate) has the advantage that it is devoid of implications with regard to socioeconomic status, but its adoption leaves a gap in that no straightforward alternative term is available for the notion of ‘substrate’” (2008: 11). As Crystal, Kouwenberg, and Singler noted, the terms substrate and ­superstrate refer to notions of social prestige that are associated with languages in contact scenarios. In creolistics, substrates are characterized as less ­prestigious language contributions from numerically dominant speech communities, whereas superstrate denotes a language that is associated with a more socially dominant, but often numerically smaller speech community. In this work on the ­endogenous West African pidgincreoles, I do not focus on that socially relative ­characterization of substrate and superstrate. Here, superstrate references the linguistic system from which a contact language drew most of its lexicon, although it is ­acknowledged that the superstrate is not always the same as the lexifier (Selbach 2008). The terms substrate and adstrate in this work retain their usual meanings in creolistics research, that is, continual sources of input that exert typological

8 

 Introduction

pressure on a linguistic system or set of systems in the case of adstrate, and transient, ancestral sources of input that provided models for units of sound, grammar, and meaning in an emergent linguistic system in the case of substrate. In a general sense, adstrate effects are seen in terms of convergence patterns (prolonged contact-induced change) with languages in a “typological matrix” (Ansaldo 2004, 2009), and substrate effects are the result of interpretations of lexifier structural patterns in terms of native language patterns (Alleyne 1971: 182), as well as transmission and maintenance of those heritage features (Mufwene 1990, 2008: 134; Alleyne 1993). Because the notions are complementary, creolists tend to avoid distinctions between substrate and adstrate, especially in contexts where (pidgin) creoles have remained in contact with their input languages. As noted in the introductory section of this chapter, the English-lexifier contact languages that are spoken along the Guinea Coast form a large group of West African (pidgin)creoles. This group is part of an even larger Atlantic (pidgin)creole group, which includes Portuguese-lexifier creoles, French-lexifier creoles, and Englishlexifier (pidgin)creoles. Specifically, Lower Guinea pidgincreoles include Ghanaian Pidgin English, Nigerian Pidgin, Equatorial Guinean Pichi, and Cameroon Pidgin English. The latter two varieties have been omitted from this monograph because I could not make contact with enough speakers and I did not have access to sufficient data on either language. Thus, in this work the notion of West African pidgincreoles refers to Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English, including its newest mixed-lect Ghanaian Student Pidgin. Krio is described below as well because of the belief that Lower Guinea pidgincreoles are simply derivations of that Upper Guinea English-lexifier creole. In later chapters, West African pidgincreoles are compared with other Atlantic creoles to determine the extent to which those languages form a typological class with respect to locative predication. The assertion is made now that locative features discussed in this monograph did not originate solely from Krio or from creoles that were carried east across the Atlantic to Sierra Leone at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the study proposes a “domestic origin” for locatives in West African pidgincreoles, similar to research put forth by Hancock (1986) and suggested by McWhorter (1997).

Advances in the substrate camp Alleyne’s (1980) seminal work Comparative Afro-American revealed continuities between Atlantic creoles and African languages of the Niger-Congo group that served as the creoles’ substrates. Along with an extensive comparative phonology and detailed comparative syntax, Alleyne addressed parallels in lexicosemantics that are attributable to shared metaphoric and metonymic



Advances in the substrate camp  

 9

conceptualizations among the dialect cluster of Afro-Caribbean creoles. In addition to that work and Turner’s (1949) early work on Gullah, there have been dozens of comparative studies that have investigated Africanisms in contact languages of the Afro-Atlantic. The common wisdom that emerges from those studies tells us that although formal differences exist in the lexicons of African languages and Afro-Caribbean languages, the patterns in the “kinds of words” that are retained in creole lexicons and the “kinds of changes” that creole words undergo from superstrate to the contact variety are at least partially explained by African influence (Holm 1988: 72). In the West African context, for instance, the intense and sustained contact that pidgincreoles have had with multiple Benue-Kwa and Ijoid languages explains why multifunctionality, polysemy, and circumlocution remain prevalent characteristics of their grammars and ­vocabularies. The chapters in the present work demonstrate that ­pidgincreole features have been modeled on lexical and grammatical constructions in their substrate and adstrate languages. The data suggest that further changes might lead to metatypic restructuring in the future, as calquing lays the basis for metatypy (Ross 2007: 129). There is an abundance of research that shows Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean creoles have moved beyond calquing and have had aspects of their grammars restructured to adhere to grammatical rules of the languages with which they have been in contact for either a relatively short period (Bakker 2006; see Ansaldo 2008 for a different perspective) or an ­extended period (Grant 2011, 2012; Cardoso 2012). Substrate research in creolistics has assembled a large body of evidence that suggests language transmission and language heritage played as important a role as superstrate influence and linguistic universals in the emergence of creole grammar. There are unfortunately still studies that are framed within dominant political discourses that portray people of African and indigenous descent as “passive victims of capitalism and racism” (Faraclas and Viada 2012: 2). In those approaches to Atlantic and Trans-Atlantic cultural studies, a European model is believed to be the one and only model for non-Europeans, and European languages their only target languages. Assumptions like these exist in creolistics as well. They unintentionally strip people of African and indigenous descent of agency in the emergence of creoles: Neither [European model or European target approach] allows space for African descended peoples to utilize their ancestral political, economic, cultural, and linguistic knowledge and skills to actually take control over their reality and shape it in their own image and make it serve their own interests. (Faraclas and Viada 2012: 11)

LeCompte Zambrana et al. (2012: 42–54) list several erroneous assumptions that prevail in the dominant discourses in creole studies: multilingualism and

10 

 Introduction

pluri-identification are the exceptions rather than the rule; the most widely spoken West African substrate languages share few typological similarities; arguments for substrate influence must prove a single language source in order to avoid the cafeteria principle; and cases for convergence among substrate, superstrate, and universals should be avoided in favor of the operation of universals alone. There have been advances in the field in recent years that have addressed these issues to some extent. At least the following studies have helped to clarify these misconceptions in the study of creoles as contact languages. Lefebvre’s (2011) edited volume on substrate- and adstrate-influenced aspects of creole morphosyntax, phonology, and semantics is the largest work to date that approaches substrate research from a comparative-typological perspective. It covers a wide range of semantic and morphosyntactic phenomena, including pronominal forms, classifiers, tense-mood-aspect systems, negation, case systems and transitivity markers, the properties of verbs, serialized verbs, verb doubling, and discourse structures (Lefebvre 2011: 11–22). The research in that volume indicates that a strong voice still exists in creolistics since the publication of Substrata Versus Universals in Creole Genesis (Muysken and Smith 1986) and Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties (Mufwene 1993), and it affirms that the search for continuity between creoles and their heritage languages and cultures remains an important endeavor in the field. However, location marking strategies and non-linguistic motivations for the use of spatial-relational items are largely non-existent in the discussion of substrate retention in contact languages. The present work aims to fill this gap in comparative studies of creoles and their substrates and adstrates. The contributions to Lefebvre’s (2011) volume are from creolists who have dedicated much of their careers to tracing the origins of creole structures. In one form or another, that research has invoked relexification, transfer, or relabeling to account for features that emerge in creole grammars that are foreign to European lexifiers. Those theories of feature transmission from substrates’ grammars require “there be a form in the superstrate language that can be semantically associated with the substrate item. Transfer/relabelling is thus constrained by whether the superstrate language has a form available to transfer or relabel a substrate lexical entry” (Lefebvre 2011: 26). In addition to a favorable superstrate lexical item, creolists also propose that two additional factors be considered in issues concerning retention or elimination of grammatical features in creoles: (i) congruence between substrate and superstrate features, an all-in situation, meaning contact languages are likely to retain features that are compatible across language boundaries, and (ii) typological similarities among groups of substrate languages, a no-contest situation, meaning contact languages are under pressure to incorporate high frequency features from source languages or omit low



Advances in the substrate camp  

 11

frequency features if they are or are not defining characteristics of a linguistic area. The omission of certain features in Hawai‘ian Creole English, for example, is due to leveling of features that are not present in its substrate languages (Siegel 2008, 2011). Conversely, features that are present in a range of a creole’s substrates are likely to show up in the creole too. Faraclas (1990) noted that such substrate reinforcement patterns occur in Tok Pisin and Nigerian Pidgin. In the Caribbean, substrate reinforcement led to the development of tense, mood, and aspect categories in the Surinamese creoles that resemble categories in many Kwa languages, though we know from recent sociohistorical and typological research that Gbe models were directly influential (Migge 2011; but see also Migge 2003; Winford and Migge 2007; and contributions to Essegbey et al. 2013). Escure (2011: 181–200) shows that counterfactuals in Belizean Creole could have been modeled on counterfactual constructions in a handful of West African languages, which suggests that those constructions constitute an areal feature in the creole’s multiple West African substrata. I aim to contribute to work like Migge’s and Escure’s studies on substrate influence in the Atlantic creoles. Specifically, in the case studies, I consider features of location marking in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English in the light of areal features of locative predication in Benue-Kwa and Ijoid languages. The survey in chapter 2 especially reveals similarities in the morphosyntax and semantics of location marking in Guinea Coast languages with the kinds of features that have emerged in locative predicates in West African (pidgin)creoles. In addition to studies on substrate influence in Atlantic creoles, there are substantial data to support claims of prolonged substrate and adstrate influence from Asian languages on the semantics, phonology, and morphosyntax of Ibero-Asian creoles (Zhiming 2011: 253–270; Lim 2011: 271–287; Ansaldo et al. 2011: 289–301). Lefebvre’s creoles and their substrates volume mentioned above contains a contribution on the Mindanao Chabacano variety known as Zamboangueño, which has several substrate, superstrate, and adstrate sources, some of which represent two or more of those categories (Grant 2011: 309). The adstrate sources for Mindanao Chabacano include Tagalog, Cebuano, Philippine English, and certain varieties of Spanish. Creolists consider those sources adstratal because they impacted the creole after it had become a stable language. This classification and treatment of adstrate influence in relation to (pidgin)creoles will be discussed in the next section. The complex histories of language contact in Asia and West Africa have resulted in fuzzy boundaries concerning what constitutes superstrate and substrate or adstrate influence. The Zamboangueño contribution in Lefebvre’s volume raises an issue with the rigid classification of linguistic sources as only substrate, superstrate, or adstrate. Grant has also discussed elsewhere (2009: 161–162) a number

12 

 Introduction

of issues that he has with generalized theories of substrate influence; both of his works cited above have challenged classical models of linguistic input on creole formation. Scholars working on the unique social histories of pidgincreoles and their relationships with languages of their geographical context have taken those criticisms into consideration. For example, Mbagwu and Eme (2012) urge creolists to rethink the superstrate-substrate question for Nigerian Pidgin. In the Ghanaian context, it has been noted that Twi and Ga are equally important forms of communication for speakers of Ghanaian Student Pidgin, in some cases even more so than English (Bonnie 2013). In the present work, I refrain from a sociolinguistic account of superstrate versus substrate in the pidgincreole context. I continue to call European superstrates the lexifiers and endogenous local languages the substrates or adstrates, with the exception noted below of early Portugueselexifier varieties spoken on the Lower Guinea Coast, which are suggested to have served as sources of adstrate influence that reinforced locative structures in early English-lexifier varieties (see Goodman 1993: 64; and Mufwene 1990: 15, note 3, however, for a comment on the use of the term substratum in Romance linguistics that describes scenarios in which languages disappeared from a contact setting, but left their marks on languages that replaced them at a later period). An important point to make concerning sociolinguistics and (pidgin)creole contexts deals with multilingualism and the typical speaker of (pidgin)creoles. That issue was raised by LaCharité (2007: 159–161) and has recently been brought up again by Roberts (2011) for Hawai‘ian Creole English in the creoles and their substrates volume. Like Hawai‘ian Creole English, Ghanaian Student Pidgin is based on an existing contact language. Speakers have access to and are able to command a prestige variety of English in addition to their mixed-code language: The manner of HCE’s [Hawai‘ian Creole English] development also differs in striking ways from what is commonly hypothesized for the creoles of the Caribbean and South America. HCE took shape in the early twentieth century in communities where education in standard English was the norm … so its early developers had a kind of access to the prestige variety of the superstrate that was not shared by those responsible for creoles like Sranan CE [Creole English] or Haitian CF [Creole French]. At the same time, HCE drew its structure substantially from a pre-existing pidgin which, in turn, received many of its features from earlier varieties in the Atlantic and Pacific. (Roberts 2011: 559)

Formally educated and non-formally educated individuals in Nigeria speak Nigerian Pidgin as well as a form of Nigerian English, and they have drawn much of the structure of the current interethnic pidgincreole spoken there from one or more of the native languages they have in their linguistic repertoires. Like the Hawai‘ian Creole English situation though, some of the features should also be thought of as relics from early Lower Guinea English- or Portuguese-lexifier



Treatment of adstrates  

 13

varieties. With respect to location marking, a general locative construction was likely to have been retained in West African pidgincreoles, first, because of the widespread use of multipurpose constructions in early contact varieties, and second, because of language convergence (Matras 2009: 238–240; 2010: 73–76), that is, the result of continual replication of that construction that is based on a dominant model in the pidgincreoles’ substrates and adstrates.

Treatment of adstrates As noted above, adstrate influence can cause convergence patterns between languages in contact. In most cases in which adstrate influence has been evident for a language contact setting, there have been multilingual speakers whose languages were spoken in close geographical locations, and over time, aspects in the domains of phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics of their languages began to resemble each other in form or function, or possibly both (Bakker and Matras 2013: 3–4). Whereas substrate influence is conceptualized in terms of linguistic contributions from non-prestige populations, adstrate influence is thought of as horizontal contributions from “populations that are of more or less the same social stratum” (Mufwene 2007: 82, footnote 18). Adstrate effects are also framed in terms of postformative contributions that bear influence on an already stable (pidgin)creole (Goodman 1993: 67–68; Mufwene 1996: 175; Warner-Lewis 1997: 209–212; Bakker and Parkvall 2005: 518; Schneider 2007: 58–60; Smith 2008: 99–100; Ansaldo 2011b: 368). The particularities of adstrate contributions to outcomes of language contact are difficult to distinguish and, consequently, they have received little attention in creole studies, often being passed over in favor of the identification of substrate input. Adstrate has also become a generic category for influence that cannot neatly be classified as either substrate or superstrate; Dutch and Amerindian contributions to the Surinamese creoles, for example, are both talked about in terms of adstrate influence (Arends et al. 1994: 99, 109; Uffmann 2007: 145; McWhorter and Good 2012: xiii; Borges 2013: 181–214). Creolists have found it useful to apply the concept of adstrate influence to contexts in which creoles exist as endogenous varieties in their linguistic ecologies. Cardoso’s (2012) use of adstrate encompasses “languages which were involved in the very formative stages of the [Luso-Asian] creoles and which would traditionally be classified as ‘substrata’” (81). In the Ibero-Asian creole context, the distinction between substrate and adstrate is blurred because the creoles have remained in contact with Asian and Pacific languages that continue to shape the creoles’ linguistic systems. In the West African context, Intumbo (2008) conflates notions of substrate and adstrate in his discussion of the Balanta contribution

14 

 Introduction

to Guinea-Bissau Creole. With respect to the West African pidgincreole dialect cluster, Yakpo argues that reduplication in Pichi is motivated by similar patterns of reduplication in its substrate and adstrate languages (2012: 279). The present work does not make fine distinctions between substrate and adstrate in its discussion of sources of input for spatial semantics in Nigerian Pidgin or Ghanaian Pidgin English because Benue-Kwa and Ijoid languages have served as sources of input from the time that the earliest forms of those contact languages were spoken on the Guinea Coast. Like the creolists cited above, I find little need to draw boundaries to separate substrate from adstrate in the pidgincreole context, nor do I think such a strict division would be useful at this time. Still, one wonders whether it is possible to differentiate substrate influence from adstrate influence, leaving aside the sociolinguistic uses of those terms. Do substrate sources become adstrate sources at some point in the history of languages in contact? The most helpful notions on this issue to date are found in Ansaldo’s (2004, 2009) work on contact languages and the Asian ecologies in which they developed. Typological matrix has already been referred to above; here, I elaborate on Ansaldo’s ideas and explain their relevance to the study of West African pidgincreoles. Ansaldo frames contact language formation as processes of socialization that are carried out in particular linguistic ecologies. Inspired primarily by Mufwene’s (2001, 2008) and Croft’s (2000) revolutionary works that approach the study of language evolution from the perspective of speciation and natural selection, Ansaldo has developed a cohesive theory for contact language formation that unites the separate, yet complementary internal and external components of a language’s ecology. External ecology represents sociohistorical phenomena that are specific to the formation of a contact language. Internal ecology of contact language formation refers to the typological character of the languages that were involved in the contact scenario, that is, the typological matrix. Alone, the ­typological matrix provides “system internal considerations” in contact language formation (Ansaldo 2009: 112). A discussion of the internal component is the most relevant to the present study, as in most chapters I primarily concentrate on non-socially relative characterizations of substrate and adstrate contributions to West African pidgincreoles. The external ecology is acknowledged as a vital component of the pidgincreoles’ development, since language use determines which linguistic features become part of the codes used by members of the speech ­community. Ansaldo is sure to mention the importance of ecology in this regard, as the type of speech community – small or big, centralized or diffuse – affects the propagation of new patterns in language (2009: 111). But the present study has a primary focus on system internal considerations to account for aspects of location marking in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English.



Treatment of adstrates  

 15

Is it possible to distinguish substrate from adstrate on system internal grounds? Here, Ansaldo’s notion of typological matrix is crucial. In a typological matrix, the notions markedness, congruence, and salience, which are key factors in the transfer and reinforcement of linguistic features, are framed in terms of type and token frequency (Ansaldo 2009: 111–113). Token frequency is characterized as the frequency of overt lexical and grammatical items in discourse, for example, obligatory case markers. Type frequency can be understood as predominant constructional patterns from input languages; those patterns produce functional alignment of features in the typological matrix. Ansaldo has found that congruence accounts for type frequency factors: “constructions that are more common, for example, because of typological congruence, are more likely to dominate the typological matrix” (Ansaldo 2009: 117). Consequently, those dominant constructions are the ones that are selected by speakers for a contact language. The absence of a copula in equative constructions in Singlish, for instance, is a case of a type frequency pattern in a typological matrix that favored a zero-copula strategy for equative marking; since Malay and Chinese languages have zerocopula equative constructions, it makes sense that Singlish would acquire the zero-copula strategy as well (Ansaldo 2004: 135). This brings us back to the issue of substrate versus adstrate in the pidgincreole context. Traditionally, creolists have only qualified substrate sources as those languages that were present during the genesis of a creole, with genesis commonly understood as a gradual process. Adstrates are the sources that came into contact with a creole after its conventional features had been established. The distinction between the two notions is often made as follows: substrate is seen as influence on emergent creole features during original pidginization/creolization processes, and adstrate is seen as influence leading to the subsequent development and entrenchment of creole features (Huber 2005). In most Caribbean contact settings, substrate sources diminished to the point that their presence could be seen only as traces in a creole’s linguistic system; as full languages, they ceased to be used by majority creole speakers. In contact areas of Melanesia, Asia, and West Africa, in contrast, there are languages that have maintained their places as facilitators of both functional alignment and type frequency patterns in a typological matrix. In contact linguistics, that influence is considered adstratal in its original sense. Taking into consideration the internal ecologies in which Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English have developed, I lean in the direction of adstrate as the best characterization of Benue-Kwa and Ijoid input for West African pidgincreoles today; those sources have remained dominant languages in the pidgincreoles’ extended typological matrix (in section 2.2, I explain the motivation for the use of extended in this term). Their continual presence has reinforced type frequency patterns in

16 

 Introduction

the matrix and has induced change in the pidgincreoles in certain linguistic domains, for example, in location marking and in comparison marking. Below we will see how features in those linguistic domains show signs of convergence with patterns in the African languages that make up part of the linguistic repertoires of multilingual, pidgincreole speakers. Substrate influence is still a useful notion in this work, though, since it is used in creolistics to refer to psycholinguistic processes like relabeling, transfer, and feature transmission that occur in creole genesis. Together, substrate and adstrate help capture a fuller appreciation of the pidgincreole internal complex, as there have been both transfer of structural and semantic patterns at genesis, as well as convergence over the pidgincreoles’ life spans toward dominant patterns in an extended typological matrix.

Linguistic areas, convergence, and (pidgin)creoles The term sprachbund refers literally to a union of languages (Emenau 1956; Zima 1971; Campbell 2006). Motivation for “union” here comes from the encyclopedic meaning of the word, which entails a grouping of linguistic entities in a larger order set. Linguists attempt to construct those sets by noting relationships among languages that are connected either geographically or historically – but not genetically; the associations are often based on structures that the languages share in morphosyntax and phonology. In English, the concept is translated as linguistic area (Velten 1943, cited in Campbell 2006; Thomason 2001: 99; Heine and Kuteva 2005: 173–182). Implied in linguistic area is the geographical proximity of certain sets of languages at some point in their histories, which more than likely contributes to their common features. The languages under consideration must belong to different linguistic subgroups, but not necessarily to different phyla (Aikhenvald 2006: 27). For example, subgroups of Atlantic and Mande languages could still form a sprachbund even though both of those subgroups belong to the higher order set Niger-Congo. Ruhlen (1991: 100–104) refers to West Atlantic, Mande, Kru, Benue-Congo, and Kwa as different families, while observing that they belong to one phylum: Niger-Congo. Shared areal features in some of those languages suggest a history of language contact that resulted in the formation of macro-linguistic areas in West Africa (Güldemann 2008, 2011: 112–113). That contact has induced grammaticalization processes in groups of languages from Senegal to Nigeria. Those grammaticalization areas are concentrated in certain regions and show areal patterning for specific constructions (Heine and Kuteva 2005: 182–185). Beyer (2009), for example, points out areal patterns in negation marking in certain West African



Linguistic areas, convergence, and (pidgin)creoles  

 17

languages (217–219). The following three features have added support for the identification of grammaticalization areas on the Guinea Coast: i) First, there are languages that show a preference for noun-adposition constructions in an otherwise normal SVO word order (Heine 1975; Heine and Nurse 2008: 8); Heine referred to those as type b languages, and they form a compact grammaticalization area from Senegal to Nigeria. ii) Second, certain Guinea Coast languages show similar patterns in the use of serialized verb constructions versus the use of verbal extensions (Heine and Kuteva 2005: 216–218). Dimmendaal (2001) states, “Presumably, important social significance was attached to such morphosyntactic constructions [serialized verb constructions]; they became emblematic features, and copying them may have served as an act of identity [on the part of Akan, Yoruba, and Igbo speakers]” (386). iii) Third, in reference to the grammatical coding of spatial relations, Creissels et al. (2008) make the claim: “The tendency to code the distinction location at/movement towards/ movement from exclusively on verbs is typical of languages spoken in a large area including the whole of Niger-Congo language, but not of African languages in general (147).

Areal linguistics, as the study of linguistic areas is known, is also concerned with the diffusion of structural features away from a geographically contiguous region (Campbell 1985, 2006). Some Afro-Caribbean creoles spoken on islands in the Greater and Lesser Antilles are thought to form a sprachbund with (pidgin) creoles that are spoken in West Africa and Central and South America (Muysken 2008: 11–20; Muysken and Smith 2014). Although not all creolists find such an overarching generalization to be useful (Goodman 1993), others have drawn on those characteristics mentioned above and more to posit the existence of a macrolinguistic area along the Guinea Coast (Gilman 1986: 33; Parkvall 2000: 155); this would help to account for the large number of shared features in Atlantic creoles and West African languages. For example, Güldemann (2005; quoted in Bartens 2013: 106) argues for substratum interference in the Atlantic creoles’ use of a verb say in quotative-complementizer functions; the interference is due to widespread polyfunctional patterns in markers of reported discourse in West African languages, including Wolof, Kisi, Mandinka, Akan, Ewe, Igbo, Izon, and northwest Bantu A languages of Cameroon. These are not a random collection of African languages, rather they are languages that have served as sources of input in the typological matrices of Atlantic (pidgin)creoles at different times in their histories. In the second chapter of this monograph, I provide a survey of areal features of location marking in those African languages and others that served as substrate and adstrate sources for Upper Guinea Portuguese-lexifier creoles and Lower Guinea English-lexifier pidgincreoles. The survey illustrates the plausibility of a domestic origin hypothesis for type frequency patterns of location marking that have been retained in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English. The following text provides a preview of those convergence patterns in the pidgincreoles.

18 

 Introduction

Congruence in a typological matrix and convergence in location marking The state of the adpositional system in West African pidgincreoles is best talked about in terms of ongoing convergence in an extended typological matrix, that is, the selection and further propagation of dominant type frequency patterns of location marking from relevant substrate and adstrate languages. There are at least two patterns that exert strong “weight” as linguistic contributions from the African component rather than the European component in the typological matrix (Aikhenvald 2011: 16–17; concept originally taken from Campbell et al. 1986). First, nominal-derived spatial items are typical features of location marking in African languages (Creissels et al. 2008: 124); similarly, West African (pidgin)creoles use nominal locatives to convey containment and support relations. Second, locative structures that carry multiple meanings and functions are found in large groups of coastal languages in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. The predominance of that feature in an ­extended typological matrix helps explain why locatives carry similar multipurpose functions in Nigerian Pidgin, Krio, and Guinea-Bissau Creole, for example. In addition to pattern replication, locatives in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Student Pidgin are also attributable to lexical and grammatical congruence with features in superstrate languages and other West African creoles. The present work takes into account the following four factors in the emergence of the multifunctional item for in West African pidgincreoles (see section 1.1.2 for an overview of this feature in Nigerian Pidgin): a. inheritance of a proto-locative verb/particle na in early Benue-Kwa languages (Lord 1993: 29–30) b. complex constructions that are formed by the co-occurrence of those general locative structures in (a) with nominal-derived spatial items c. uses of a generalized locative structure in the earliest and most widely used Portuguese-lexifier contact languages on the Lower Guinea Coast d. greater polysemy expressed in prepositions in Early Modern English Frequency and saliency of features in (b)–(d) would have reinforced the use of similar features in an extended typological matrix, as stressed in the works of Siegel (1999, 2000: 210–211), Mufwene (2008: 115–132), and Ansaldo (2009: 112–120). Factor (a) above deals with an inherited feature in the pidgincreoles’ substrates and adstrates. The proto-locative particle na is a shared feature of Benue-Kwa languages. It has emerged in form or function in dozens of those languages as a locative or locative-derived structure (see chapter 5). Those structures reinforced the uses of a similar feature in early Portuguese-lexifier varieties that were spoken along the



Linguistic areas, convergence, and (pidgin)creoles  

 19

Guinea Coast. The emergence of a multipurpose, locative predicate structure ­realized as na in those Portuguese-lexifier varieties, and in Krio for that matter, are due to two factors and both deal with congruence and convergence in location marking an extended typological matrix. First, Portuguese has a portmanteau locative na (Parkvall 2000: 108); early debates in creolistics claimed that the Portuguese preposition em used with the ­feminine article a (em+a→na) was the source of locative na in Upper Guinea ­Portuguese-lexifier creoles, although there are some scholars who work on Upper Guinea creoles who have justifiably abandoned this single origin theory today (Hancock 2001: 308; Intumbo 2008: 109–110). Certainly extended uses of that locative in a range of idiolects of Portuguese provided type and token frequency patterns in a typological matrix of Upper Guinea Portuguese-lexifier creoles ­(Clements 2009: 47). Often overlooked in favor of the superstrate contribution is the African component. Second, the dominant Atlantic and Mande languages that make up the typological matrix of Upper Guinea creoles also have multipurpose, locative predicate structures; type frequency effects (and also token frequency effects in some cases, for instance from Serer, Balanta, and Mandinka) led to the emergence of a general locative construction in Upper Guinea creoles. Similar constructional meanings are realized by for in West African pidgincreoles. Chapter 5 discusses the general locative construction in more detail and makes the claim that its prominence in location marking in Guinea Coast languages helped motivate the emergence of locative for in English-lexifier varieties. The overarching goal of the present volume is to highlight the substrate and adstrate contributions to location marking in West African pidgincreoles. The close contacts that West African pidgincreoles have had with their substrate and adstrate languages in Nigeria and Ghana have reinforced patterns in locative predication that are discussed in detail in chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the present work. These case studies show that the morphosyntax and semantics of locative for, for example, bear a close resemblance to the morphosyntax and semantics of locative verbs and spatial-relational items derived from those verbs in Lower Guinea coastal languages. Interestingly, the form of for in West African pidgincreoles might not have originated exclusively from the Metropolitan English preposition for after all (section 5.5). Assuming this hypothesis is true, then Lower Guinea coastal languages influenced not only the meanings and functions of for, but also aspects of its phonetic substance. Although I argue against the common assumption that the preposition for in Early Modern English was the only source for the multipurpose item for in restructured English-lexifier varieties that were spoken on the Lower Guinea Coast, I do not deny the contribution from the lexifier. In fact, I recognize that the preposition in regional varieties of British English would have played a role

20 

 Introduction

in the emergence of for in early contact varieties in West Africa, since early uses of the preposition exceeded the ways in which for is used today. Also, the same form of the preposition in Metropolitan English appears throughout the diary of the Efik trader Antera Duke (Forde 1956). Behrendt et al. (2010) contend that Duke learned English informally by “hearing spoken words and seeing them written in captain’s accounts and letters” (120). The Efik trader must have associated some patterns of use in Early Modern English for with patterns of locative structures in the Cross River languages that he spoke. Although there were extended uses of for in Early Modern English, the preposition did not convey a general notion of space; its use was extended to a complementizer function or it was used as a directional preposition (Visser 1963: 162; van Gelderen 1998). That is, for was not used in Englishes of that time to render the same kinds of constructions that locatives could render in Antera Duke’s native languages. Nevertheless, for was recruited in the contact language to take on the role of a construction that existed in local African languages of the Cross River region. The recruitment of for to convey a general locative construction in a contact variety is in line with the notion “pivot matching” described in Matras and Sakel (2007): “[I]dentifying a structure that plays a pivotal role in the model construction, and matching it with a structure in the replica language to which a similar pivotal role is assigned in a new, replica construction” (830). There is an advantage to framing the emergence of novel constructions in an English-lexifier variety like the one that Antera Duke spoke as pattern replication, or the exportation of constructions as opposed to the importation of structures. It highlights “spontaneous bilingual creativity” on the part of speakers to make use of constructions that they already have in their linguistic repertoires (Matras and Sakel 2007: 841). That creativity has resulted in convergence of pidgincreole spatial semantics with the general character of locatives in the African languages that have been spoken alongside Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English since they were pidgins. Convergence scenarios provide the most satisfactory explanations for the emergence and continual use of structures like for, and they help to reconcile issues of simplicity versus complexity in (pidgin)creole grammar. The notion of complexity in the adpositional systems of pidgins and creoles has not been directly addressed in the study of West African pidgincreoles. It could be that Afro-Caribbean creoles’ adpositional systems were impoverished in their early stages, as speakers shed ornamental features and retained only functional items. This relic of the pidgin cycle would only partly explain why items like for and (i)na convey polysemous, general locative functions in Atlantic (pidgin)creoles today. In the present work, I stress that adpositional systems in West African pidgincreoles have been expanding throughout their histories. Location marking patterns in those languages have converged with patterns in



Outline and content of the case studies  

 21

the languages with which they are in contact. The same phenomenon occurs on the Upper Guinea Coast with the Portuguese-lexifier creoles. Bartens remarks that Guinea-Bissau Creole is “clearly structurally further removed from Portuguese than any variety of the Cape Verdean Creole cluster to which it is historically related … which is a result of the prolonged contact with local indigenous languages and the much lesser presence of Portuguese” (2013: 66). A primary difference in the West African pidgincreole context, however, is that English has held a dominant presence in Nigeria and Ghana since the nineteenth century (Huber 2004a: 844; Gut 2004: 814). Still, like the Portuguese-lexifier creoles, there are aspects of the pidgincreoles’ adpositional systems that reflect dominance of a West African type (see chapter 2 for details), as opposed to a western European type. The findings from the case study in chapter 3 on locative predication in Ghanaian Student Pidgin points to an early stage of development in the use of locative verbs and adverbials in that contact variety. Ghanaian Student Pidgin speakers draw from a lexical and grammatical reservoir to mark location in their mixed variety. In a similar vein, speakers of pre-Krio-influenced Lower Guinea English-lexifier varieties would have resorted to structures in their existing grammars when they attempted to communicate in a contact language; most would have spoken a first or second language of the Kru, Benue-Kwa, or Ijoid stock. In fact, we find aspects of location marking that are typical of those model languages in the e­ ncoding of spatial relations in early English-lexifier varieties. This is also what happened in Suriname at the end of the seventeenth century (Migge 2003: 30–33), and it is apparent today in the use of postnominal spatial items in Ghanaian Student Pidgin. Student pidgin speakers use spatial items that appear in postposition in large part because the use of those structures signifies a linguistic act of identity (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985); the further away from English structures, and possibly Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English structures, the better. The result is a mixed spatial system that most closely resembles the Kwa type.

Outline and content of the case studies Many of the methodologies that are used in this monograph are new to the field of creolistics. Only a handful of scholars have drawn on methods and tools in semantic typology to investigate location marking in Atlantic creoles. Even fewer people have used cognitive-functional frameworks to analyze the interface between form and function of locatives in those languages. Through this research, I hope to capture the attention of readers who employ corpus linguistic methods in their work to study variation of structural features in World Englishes and who draw on experimental methods and corpus-based approaches to

22 

 Introduction

analyze features of location marking in pidgins and creoles. Data are displayed throughout the present text in 20 tables and the analyses are supported by 150 examples that were taken from grammars of the pidgincreoles, dictionaries and grammars of their substrate and adstrate languages, and computerized corpora of Nigerian Pidgin that were compiled by specialists in the field (Faraclas 1996; Deuber 2005). In chapter 2 of this monograph, I explore the concept of locative predication as it is defined in the literature on semantic typology (Levinson et al. 2003), and I give an overview of locative predication in an extended West African (pidgin) creole typological matrix – this notion is based on Ansaldo’s treatment of typological matrix for Asian contact languages (2004, 2009). A large set of Niger-Congo languages, Portuguese- and English-lexifier contact languages, and era-specific regional varieties of Portuguese and English make up the extended typological matrix in which Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English developed (Alleyne 1971; Hancock 1972, 1986, 1994; Huber 1999b). Chapters 3 and 4 contain case studies that help us to better understand the conceptual structure of space in West African pidgincreoles. The work was partly motivated by Winford’s observation that locative predication is a domain that is most resistant to change in later creole development (1993: 381). In these chapters, I look for effects of contact-induced influence on the adpositional systems of West African pidgincreoles. I concentrate on Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Student Pidgin because they share a similar history characterized by extensive language mixing and a renewed sense of language appropriation by their users in the ­twentieth century. Chapter 5 provides a comprehensive study on the origins of the multifunctional item for in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English. I bring to light the idiosyncratic ecologies of the endogenous West African pidgincreoles, which are still in contact with the African languages that served as primary sources of influence for their morphosyntax and semantics. Finally, chapter 6 summarizes the study of spatial semantics in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English and offers suggestions for further research that could not be included in this monograph on the meanings, functions, and origins of locative constructions in West African pidgincreoles.

Locative structures and constructional pairings Like Welmers (1973) did in his survey of structural phenomena in African languages, I often resort to the general notion structures to refer to verbal extensions, locative adverbials, and other grammatical morphemes that appear in locative



Locative structures and constructional pairings  

 23

predicates in African languages and West African pidgincreoles. Most of the authors of the works on Niger-Congo languages and Atlantic (pidgin)creoles that I consulted used particular abbreviations for structures in those languages. In this monograph, I retained those abbreviations that the authors employed in their glosses so that the original meanings would not be lost. However, if authors did not provide glosses for linguistic structures in their works, which was often the case in the nineteenth-century dictionaries and grammars of Twi for instance, the abbreviations listed on page xiv of this monograph were used for those examples; in other cases, the glosses included direct English translations. In the Ghanaian Student Pidgin examples, the items de and dɛ were written differently so that the reader could distinguish the locative copula de from the definite article dɛ. I use the term construction in this work to refer to lexicogrammatical patterns in language use. A construction can be a single word, as in body in Ghanaian Student Pidgin, or it can be a combination of constructions, as in de for in Nigerian Pidgin. The construction is not merely the sum of its parts, as Lakoff and Johnson explain (1999: 502): A construction is a pairing of a complex conceptual structure with a means of expressing that conceptual structure. … Each grammatical construction indicates (1) how the meaning of the parts of the construction are related to the meaning of the whole construction; (2) how the conceptual combination is expressed in linguistic form (for example, by linear order or by morphological marking); and (3) what additional meaning or cognitive function is expressed by virtue of (1) and (2).

In Nigerian Pidgin, a possessive meaning of de for emerges from the pairing of the locative copula de with the spatial-relational item for, as in, Disease de for our country, which is best translated as, Our country has a disease problem. Taking Lakoff and Johnson’s conditions for a construction, the Nigerian Pidgin example can be analyzed as follows: 1) The source domain location is used to conceptualize a target domain possession, which implies a local relationship between two entities (Lyons 1977: 722–723). 2) As a syntactic unit, de for conceptually links the preceding noun phrase to the proceeding noun phrase. Its position between the two noun phrases reinforces the underlying LINK image schema activated by the construction. 3) The meaning of de for is not limited to locative expression, since the construction is not the sum of its parts. The single constructions combine to express a conceptual LINK or PART-WHOLE frame, which can render a possessive meaning.

Constructional pairings of locative structures and possessive meanings are found in many languages in the world. The possessive meaning is dependent on the underlying locative semantics of the construction (Heine 1997: 102–103, points 1

24 

 Introduction

and 5.). In addition to universals and input from English in the form of ­idiomatic expressions, locatives convey possessive meanings Nigerian Pidgin and ­Ghanaian Pidgin English partly because they have been modeled on similar constructions in Benue-Kwa and Ijoid languages. Through the case studies in this monograph, I hope to show that degrees of entrenchment of nominal-derived spatial word forms and multipurpose spatial-relational constructions in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Student Pidgin are due to lexical congruence and structural convergence with locatives in superstrate varieties of West African Englishes and substrate and adstrate languages that have impacted and still continue to shape the contact languages’ morphosyntactic and semantic systems. It will become apparent, however, that the pidgincreoles adhere to a particular areal and typological character in the domain of locative predication that is patterned less on a European model and more on a West African model.

Chapter 1

Spatial semantics in West African pidgincreoles 1 Introduction Research in the field of creolistics has increased our understanding of the grammatical and phonological systems of pidgins and creoles and has provided answers to questions about social and cognitive aspects of language use in language contact settings. Semantics, in comparison, has been largely neglected in the creole context. This is especially true with regard to the semantics of spatial language. There are few extensive accounts of what creoles of the Afro-Caribbean region inherited from African or Caribbean languages in terms of spatial semantics (as opposed to morphosyntax). Scholars in African linguistics have begun to project a stronger voice in this area and, in doing so, have contributed more proof for the argument that Kwa ­languages influenced the semantic systems of Englishlexifier creoles, Sranan and Saramaccan in particular (Essegbey 2005; Huttar et al. 2007). In an attempt to fill this gap in creolistics concerning the study of spatial language, I focus on locatives in West African pidgincreoles. In the present chapter, I provide background information on those languages and describe the methodologies that were used to study their spatial semantics. It is necessary to begin with an overview of locative predicate structures in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English to give the reader sufficient background information to follow discussions in later chapters. Before proceeding, though, some introductory remarks are made on the West African (pidgin)creoles’ entwined histories.

1.1 A general overview of Krio, Nigerian Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English Krio, Cameroon Pidgin, Equatorial Pichi, Nigerian Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English are part of a dialect continuum that stretches down the West African coast (Mafeni 1971). As stated above, this monograph does not accept the argument that locative structures in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English originated solely from Krio. Such an assumption implicitly disregards the influence that early English- and Portuguese-lexifier varieties that were spoken along the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, and the Bight of Biafra had on the grammar and lexicon of pidgincreoles that are spoken in those areas today. Although Krio and other Upper Guinea English-lexifier varieties were transmitted down the coast by

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 1 Spatial semantics in West African pidgincreoles

migrant workers in the mid-nineteenth century and would eventually influence the prototypical English-lexifier language that was associated with the Lower Guinea Coast after that time (Huber 1999b: 119–125), Portuguese- and early Lower Guinea English-lexifier varieties in places like Elmina and Old Calabar should be acknowledged for their linguistic impact on the pidgincreoles. As I suggest through the data presented in chapters 2 and 5, the origins of general locative constructions and nominal-derived spatial items in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English are best accounted for by looking to areal features of locative predication in Upper and Lower Guinea coastal languages and West African Portuguese-lexifier creoles rather than to Caribbean creoles or European lexifiers. The next section continues with a short description of the (pidgin)creoles that are pertinent to the present study.

1.1.1 Krio Krio is an English-lexifier creole spoken in Sierra Leone. Most aspects of modern Krio grammar were established in the second half of the nineteenth century, though the exact decade is still under debate in creolistics. The British established the province of freedom, or Freetown, in Sierra Leone with the abolition of the slave trade in Britain in 1787. A few hundred freed slaves from England were the first of four waves of relocated African or Africandescended communities who would populate the colony. Five years after the arrival of the first settlers, a new wave of freed slaves was given passage from America to Freetown for their service to the British during the American Revolutionary War. This group is known as the Nova Scotia emigrants. Huber (1999b: 62) has summarized the demographics of the Nova Scotia group from the Birch Town public records of emigrants entering the settlement in 1791: 41.7% were from Virginia, 28.7% were African-born, 21.4% were from the Carolinas, and 8.3% were from Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, Boston, Maryland, New Jersey, and ­Pennsylvania. After giving these statistics, Huber dissolves the African-born group by dispersing its numbers among the three other groups. He does this based on two ­assumptions. First, one-third of the 153 persons characterized as “African-born” were children who Huber doubts were actually born or brought up in Africa, since their age at the time of record conflicts with the time at which their families joined the Loyalists. Given this reasoning, he says that those children would have spoken an African American dialect and not an African language, and he redistributes that group among the other three. Taking the opposite view, if we assume that the records are accurate and those children were born in Africa, or that their African-born parents



1.1 A general overview of Krio, Nigerian Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English 

 27

spoke to them in an African language, then they would have had knowledge of an African language as their first language and they would have continued to speak that language within a particular speech community in addition to an African American dialect in Freetown. In terms of bilingualism and multilingualism, then, the African-born group would have constituted an important entity in the newly formed Sierra Leone community. Second, Huber reorganizes the groups on the assumption that African-born adults would have acquired knowledge of an Afro-Caribbean dialect while working on plantations alongside persons born in the Americas or in the Caribbean. For these reasons, the author states, “we may ignore the African party in the calculation of percentages and suppose that they came from Virginia, Carolina, or the other locations” (1999b: 62). Huber’s (1999b) regrouping of the Nova Scotia emigrants ignores the fact that a recorded 28.7% of the persons arriving in Sierra Leone in 1791 had some knowledge of an African language, though the author does remark on this striking statistic in later work (2004b: 84). Shifting the attention away from the African component, Huber highlights the African American or Afro-Caribbean languages that the Nova Scotians brought with them to Sierra Leone. Important to remember is that the African American and Afro-Caribbean varieties contained structures that had been modeled on structures from African languages in their genesis, and hence those structures resembled the kinds of structures in the African varieties that more than a quarter of the newly arrived population in Freetown were familiar with. Upon their arrival in Freetown, the African-born persons, and hence speakers of Niger-Congo languages, would have used aspects of the grammars of their native languages when communicating in a contact variety with other Africans or African-descended persons in the new colony. In those exchanges, the negotiation of features would lead to leveling of low frequency constructions and the stabilization of dominant type frequency constructions, for example, constructions used to locate entities in time and space. There are sections in chapters 2 and 5 where I discuss the features that are typical of those languages in the typological matrix of early Krio and provide convergence scenarios for their retention in (pidgin)creoles. In 1800, the third wave of emigrants arrived in Sierra Leone. This group consisted of 525 maroons from western Jamaica. Literature on early Sierra Leone history suggests that the Maroon and the Nova Scotians remained segregated from each other in Freetown and surrounding communities. Their separation is believed to have been due to hostilities between the groups on account of the assistance that the Maroons provided Europeans during a rebellion in the colony by the Nova Scotians. Examples of differences between the Maroons’ language and the Nova Scotians’ language are often used to indicate the existence of two separate creole communities in early Krio history. Creolists have claimed that

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 1 Spatial semantics in West African pidgincreoles

the structure of modern Krio shares so many similarities with Jamaican Maroon Creole that the origins of Krio can be attributed to the role of the maroons who entered the colony at the beginning of the nineteenth century (for an overview, see Hancock 1986: 73–74). However, Joseph Opala, scholar of the e­ ighteenth-century slave trade in Sierra Leone and specialist on the British slave castle at Bunce Island, prompts historians and creolists to reexamine the supposed divisions that existed between the ethnic groups in Freetown and the indigenous peoples in the surrounding area and stop thinking in terms of strict boundaries isolating members of pluri-identified creole communities: We need to stop assuming that the Nova Scotian settlers were so totally estranged from the Maroons that the two groups didn’t talk to each other. We need to stop assuming that the Freetown settlers, in general, didn’t have frequent interaction with indigenous Sierra Leoneans from the early days of the colony. We need to stop assuming that the local people were not already speaking pidgins and creoles of their own. And, finally, we need to stop assuming that the settlers created Krio primarily from language influences they brought from America. These false assumptions are all deeply entrenched in the literature on early Freetown, and they have helped confuse scholarly analysis of the origin of the Krio language for a long time. (personal communication, January 31, 2014)

Corcoran (1998) and Nylander (1999) also believe that creolists have overestimated the settler component in the search for Krio origins. Nylander argued against the claim that modern Krio is a Caribbean-derived creole. He gave examples from the tense-mood-aspect system in Krio to show incompatibilities with the system in Jamaican Creole, namely in the use of kìn as a mood and aspect marker. The work of both Corcoran and Nylander maintain that the Nova Scotian and Jamaican Maroon populations that came to Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century were numerically less important than the fourth wave of persons to enter the colony: the African recaptives who populated Sierra Leone from 1808 to 1864. The African recaptives were freed from slaving ships and slaving factories with the Abolition Act of 1807. Over the course of 50 years, freed African captives were taken to Freetown to help populate the colony. Basing his argument on the literature written about the histories of the Sierra Leone Krio populations (Peterson 1969; Spitzer 1974), Nylander asserts that the ethnic group and the language recognized today as modern Krio emerged between 1850 and 1870, which suggests that modern “Krio was formed essentially in West Africa” (1999: 159). The major point of contention that was raised earlier about the Africanspeaking population in early Freetown revolved around the issue of whether Africanborn settlers would have drawn on aspects of their Niger-Congo languages or even on aspects of their varieties of African American creole when they stepped



1.1 A general overview of Krio, Nigerian Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English 

 29

into that language contact scenario. We would expect the continual use of general locative na from the earliest forms of an English-lexifier variety into Modern Krio since all the dominant languages in the history of that creole’s typological matrix have contained structures that convey general locative meanings. In addition, general locative constructions appear in all of the varieties that were brought back to West Africa by creole-speaking settlers and it is a high type frequency construction in the Lower Guinea languages that ended up there via recaptives in the nineteenth century (Behrendt et al. 2010: 113–118). The Afro-Caribbean creoles copied it from their substrates or inherited it from an early West African English-lexifier contact language, that is, Guinea Coast Creole English (see section 2.4.3). 1.1.1.1 Locative structures in Krio Krio is similar to its West African pidgincreole sister languages in terms of locative predication. There is a locative copula, which is distinct from the equative copula, and a multipurpose locative structure that is used more frequently than other spatial-relational items. Krio has at least 20 items that van de Vate calls adpositions (2006). Na conveys a general concept of space, although it is often glassed as in, on, and at in English. The language also has structures that are used for specific locative purposes, including pàn ‘upon’; bòt ‘about’; bày ‘by’; ònda ‘under’; pantâp ‘on top’; ôp ‘up’; dông ‘down’; botôm ‘under/at the bottom’; klôs ‘close’; nía ‘near’; néba ‘neighboring’; ínsay ‘inside’; bíèn ‘behind’; bìfó ‘before/in front of’ (van de Vate 2006: 236; and found throughout Fyle and Jones 1980). Since the locative structures in Krio precede the noun phrase, Fyle and Jones (1980: xxvii) and van de Vate label them prepositions. Krio speakers use hyponyms to convey spatial concepts for containment and support relations. This is a general tendency in many West African (pidgin)creoles. Chapters 2 and 6 return to the discussion of hyponymy in those languages. 1.1.2 Nigerian Pidgin Nigerian Pidgin is part of a dialect cluster of West African pidgincreoles and is spoken by more than 70 million Nigerians. This makes it the most widely spoken language in Nigeria and also the language of the largest (pidgin)creole-speaking community in the world (Faraclas 2004: 828). There are dozens of discussions about the multiple social histories of the language; the present work consulted in particular Barbag-Stoll (1983), Egbokhare (2001), Deuber (2005), and the review of the literature in Esizimetor (2010).

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 1 Spatial semantics in West African pidgincreoles

The term pidgin in the name Nigerian Pidgin is misleading, considering that many southern Nigerians speak it as a first language along with Yoruba, Igbo, Izon, Edo, and other coastal languages. Nigerian Pidgin is best characterized in terms of a continuum consisting of three referential social lects (Rotimi and Faraclas, n.d.): The mesolects are used most often by people who learned Pidgin as a first language or by those who use Pidgin in most of their day-to-day activities. … The acrolects of Pidgin are the social dialects which are used most often by people who have passed Primary 6. … Sometimes the rules of grammar found in the mesolects are changed by speakers of the acrolects to make them seem more like Standard English. … The basilects of Pidgin are the social dialects which are spoken most often by people who did not learn Pidgin as their first language, who never attended school or who attended for only a few years, and who use Pidgin only in certain limited situations, such as in the market. (7–8)

To show structural and lexical differences among acrolectal, mesolectal, and basilectal Nigerian Pidgin, Rotimi and Faraclas render different variations of the English sentence, I will cut the yam with a knife (n.d.: 9): Mesolect: À gò ték náyf kọ́t dì nyám. Acrolect: À gò kọ́t dì yám wìt máchet. Basilect: À gò tékam néf kọ́tam nyám. For the research in this monograph, I drew on data representative of mesolectal varieties of Nigerian Pidgin (Faraclas 1996; Deuber 2005). 1.1.2.1 Locative structures in Nigerian Pidgin Nigerian Pidgin displays extreme variation in the use of spatial language. The variation makes it difficult to give the precise number of spatial-relational items that exist in the language. Nevertheless, it is still possible to list the most frequent items in the corpus that Deuber (2005) compiled for Nigerian Pidgin. Deuber’s 80,000-word corpus yields an impressive number of spatial-relational items in Nigerian Pidgin (2005). However, most of those items are used in temporal senses or in fixed expressions. Excluding the ones that are not pertinent to the expression of topological spatial relations, the most frequent locatives in Lagos Nigerian Pidgin include inside, on top, under, front, behind, and for (Deuber 2005: 100–102). Other items that the author includes in her appendix (2005: 231–232), such as in, on, at, over, and upon, are omitted in this discussion since all of their uses are related to time expressions, parts of fixed expressions, or parts of phrasal verbs, for example, in time, on di twenty-seventh, at all, and hand over the microphone. In addition to Deuber’s items, among, bitwin, and nia can be added to the



1.1 A general overview of Krio, Nigerian Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English 

 31

list of spatial-relational items in Anglophone Nigerian Pidgin as well (Mann 1993: 62–63). Regardless of how many locative structures researchers posit for the particular variety of Nigerian Pidgin that they study, for is always described as the most frequent and polysemous item in the language (Mann 1993; Faraclas 1996; Deuber 2005). Its multifunctional use dates at least as far back as the late eighteenth century, as the diary of Antera Duke shows. The following paragraph displays 10 different uses of for in a single diary entry from 1786 (Behrendt et al. 2010): I hav see the poeples about 200 hand com for mee the want me to give 2 my father son for pown Roonsom the men Eyo Duk was stop for what the owe him and the say one the men Dead for Arshbong Duk hand . . . soon after I see one my men was Liv him to canow com up and tell me he say Enyong poeples tak my canow way for Landing so I Run & go Down for Landing I find no canow and the stop two my Boy out in canow and putt for Iron so the com Back and stop awaw son for my face and carry way to putt for Iron so the com Down one time about 30 guns for the hand the Look for shoot me and after 2 clock the Bring canow for Landing … (178, bold mine) I saw the people, about 200 hands, coming to me. They wanted me to give 2 of my father’s sons as pawns to ransom the men Eyo Duke had stopped [seized] for what they owed him; and they said one of the men was dead by Archibong Duke’s hand. … Soon after I saw one of my men who was left at the canoe come up and tell me that Enyong people had taken my canoe away from the landing. Then I ran down to the landing. I found no canoe; and they stopped two of my canoe boys from the canoe and put them in irons. Then they came back and stopped Awa Ofiong’s son before my face and carried him away to put in irons. They came down [at] once with about 30 hand guns [musqutoons], looking to shoot me; and after 2 o’clock they brought the canoe to the landing. … (179, bold mine)

Chapter 4 discusses the polysemy of this construction in more detail. For is also the most frequent spatial-relational item in Ghanaian Pidgin English. The next section provides a description of for in that pidgincreole.

1.1.3 Ghanaian Pidgin English Huber (1999b) has done the most extensive work to date on the structure and sociolinguistic history of Ghanaian Pidgin English. Ghanaian Pidgin English is similar to its sister language Nigerian Pidgin due to the sociohistorical ties that the two pidgincreoles share. The contact variety is assumed to be an exogenous language whose form mirrors Nigerian Pidgin partly because Nigerians brought the language into Ghana from the Niger Delta region, but also because ­Ghanaians carried the contact variety back into their country after working in Nigeria

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 1 Spatial semantics in West African pidgincreoles

in the 1970s. Adding to the complexity, there is the fact that Nigerian Pidgin, and thus Ghanaian Pidgin English, acquired some aspects of its grammar from Upper Guinea creoles like Krio and Kru English when seamen came to the Lower Guinea Coast at the end of the nineteenth century to work as laborers (Holm 1989: 427; Kropp Dakubu 1997: 157). While that last scenario is historically accurate, it nevertheless overshadows the influence that local Nigerian and Ghanaian languages have had on their respective pidgincreoles. Aceto (1999) has raised his concerns about this issue as well. In chapters 2, 3, and 5 of the present work, I aim to assuage reservations concerning a domestic origin for aspects of the grammar of Ghanaian Pidgin English. Many books on West African English-lexifier varieties overlook Ghanaian Pidgin English because of the commonly held belief that the language is merely a variant of Krio, Kru English, or Nigerian Pidgin. Spencer (1971), for example, does not mention Ghanaian Pidgin English in his work on English in West Africa. This is a shortcoming in the study of West African pidgincreoles, especially considering that Ghanaian Student Pidgin speakers produce some of the most radical forms of pidgincreole today. 1.1.3.1 Locative structures in Ghanaian Pidgin English The locative structures that exist in Ghanaian Pidgin English as used by nonStudent Pidgin speakers are similar to the items that one finds in Nigerian Pidgin and Krio (Huber 1999b: 214). For is by far the most common (Huber 2008: 389, original brackets): Fɔ is the main general locative/directional preposition in GhP. As in NigP, locative fɔ can be followed by insai or autsai ( free objects on surfaces > contained objects > attached objects postural verbs -------------------->