Abstract
This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on morphological structure, complexity and change in both the area of morphology and that of creolistics by revisiting the phenomenon of verb form alternation in Mauritian Kreol (I will from here onwards refer to the language as Mauritian for readability even though speakers refer to it as kreol.), a French lexified creole. Using a lexical database of 2039 distinct verbs, I show that contrary to previous assumptions, the verb alternation found in Mauritian cannot strictly be reduced to phonological or morphosyntactic principles. I argue that Mauritian has evolved a purely morphological distinction between two verb forms of the same lexeme (a long and a short form) whose heterogeneous distribution can be characterized as morphomic (Aronoff, 1994; Maiden 2018)—and therefore as contributing significantly to the system’s integrative complexity (Ackerman and Malouf 2013). The existence of morphomic structure crucially weakens repeated claims about creoles’ ‘exceptional’ status. The diachronic emergence of the alternation does not in fact constitute grammatical simplification. Rather, Mauritian verb forms are a reflex of the French paradigmatic organization whose function is exapted in the linguistic ecology in which Mauritian emerged. The type of recalibration witnessed in the Mauritian verb system offers a new lens into creole genesis, which is consistent with the view that morphology is a complex adaptive system whose development is driven by discriminative learning and communicative constraints.
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Notes
I use the following abbreviations:
def
definite
dem
demonstrative
def.irr
definite irrealis
indf
indefinite
indf.irr
indefinite irrealis
lf
long form
sf
short form
stf
strong form
spf
specific
prep
preposition
perf
perfective
prog
progressive
pst
past
prf
perfect
whd
weak head
A creole’s lexifier is the language from which it inherits most of its vocabulary.
One of the questions that is regularly raised is the extent to which the alternation could be explained by a combination of truncation and automatic phonology. As will be argued in the next section, the alternation is neither constrained by phonotactics nor phonetic structure of the language in the environment in which the truncation occurs.
Example given in Seychellois but is similar to Mauritian (Corne, 1982:51).
See also Chaudenson (2003) for a similar proposal.
See Bonami et al. (2012) for a similar view.
See also Baker and Corne (1986).
See also Syea (1992).
For practical purposes, I use the terminology employed by the authors. Full infinitives are traditionally assumed to contain an infinitival particle that introduces the infinitival verb in contrast with bare infinitives which appear without. The question of whether a category ‘infinitive’ should be distinguished is Mauritian is irrelevant to the discussion at hand; the point being that there is a contrast in Mauritian between a structure with a particle introducing the verb and one without and while both verb forms may appear preceding these VPs, they are not in free variation.
Some of the phonological changes affecting inherited French words are identified below.
French⟶Mauritian
example
trans.
⟶
⟶
‘detach’
⟶
⟶
‘eat’
⟶
/__\([_{\sigma}\)
⟶
‘leave’
⟶
⟶
‘smoke’
⟶
/#C__
⟶
‘give again’
⟶
⟶
‘go out’
Other languages that have contributed to Mauritian include English, Malagasy, Bhojpuri/Hindi, and certain Bantu languages (Baker, 1972). The kinds of phonological patterns that these languages may have given rise to are not examined here nor are they relevant to our discussion.
The alternating verb ‘galoupe’ have substituted the forms ‘couri/cour’ for ‘run’ whereas the form sivré is still used among older speakers. Data are from Baker et al. (2007).
The same form is also found in other French-based creoles as the sf of the verb fini ‘to finish’.
More generally, Morin (1986:184) notes that the final [
] of infinitival forms is more or less phonetically lost in many Northern French dialects. The presence of rhotic ending verbs in synchrony might in fact signal the creation of new forms based on the Old French conjugation pattern ending with a schwa.In colloquial French, the distinction between final /
/ and /
is leveled to /
/.An exception is Veenstra (2009)’s approach. But it is not clear how syncretic forms are accounted for since he mainly focuses on the syntactic constraints conditioning the choice between a lf and a distinct sf.
For example, Indo-Portuguese varieties like Korlai and Daman have created a fourth conjugation class with an identifiable theme vowel -u-, which hosts verbs with Gujarathi and/or Konkani origins (Bonami et al., 2013).
Bonami and Henri (2010b) shows however that predictability relations are worsed from sf ⟶ lf in particular when a sf (or homophonous sfs) corresponds to distinct lfs
My construal of lexical insertion in this paper slightly differs from that of Maiden (2005) which he equates with introduction of suppletive forms.
How these forms are analyzed synchronically is a different question. They could be argued to be lexically listed.
Baker (2003), Baker and Kriegel (2013) confidently assert that the formation of verbs expressing attenuative reduplication can also involve a lf as reduplicant. In fact, the example provided is a case of syntactic doubling expressing intensity rather than attenuation. Attenuative reduplication strictly constrains the reduplicant to be the sf of the verb whereas the base can be either sf or lf. (For a detailed discussion of this point, see Henri, 2010, 2012.)
An anonymous reviewer points out that these examples contradict work by Hassamal (2017) on the position of Mauritian adverbs, argued to never appear between the verb and its complement and that this position may be attributed to a specific genre of written Mauritian given the source of the examples. While admittedly non-canonical, the V-adv-O structure presents restrictions analogous to what can be found in French. Only a subset of adverbs may interfere between the verb and its object (Hassamal et al., 2019) and it may collocate more frequently with some verbs.
-
(i)
-
(ii)
-
(i)
Abeillé et al. (2003:8) introduce the notion of weak head to account for the syntax of nonoblique ‘à’ and ‘de’ in French. Like its French analogues, Mauritian pou has prepositional origins and selects non-finite VPs, i.e., VPs that cannot be TMA-marked, which argues against an analysis of pou as a mood marker. As a weak head, pou inherits the head value of its verbal complement and raises its subject. But compared to French, a resumptive pronoun may appear in the subject position of a VP marked with pou.
E.g. a VP marked by the weak head pou.
See also Seuren (1995).
The promotion of adjuncts is also witnessed in Malagasy, which as noted counts among the contributing languages to the emergence of Mauritian Creole.
For a detailed description of the uses of the Tswana applicative, see Creissels (2004).
Veenstra (2017) goes even further in claiming that Mauritian is a Bantu language.
See Leonetti and Vidal (2008) on Verum Focus Fronting in Spanish.
It is to be noted that a large draft of Zulu recruits were sent to Mauritius for training during the First World War to entertain European imperialist ambitions. The term zulu meaning ‘dark/black’ in Mauritian is commonly used to describe a person of dark skin. It is also used as a nickname for people with dark skin. Other words that identify particular African populations, toponyms or generally words of African etymology e.g. Maconde (toponym, cf. Makonde people/language), mazanbik (name given to Mauritians of African origin), matak ‘buttocks’ (etym. Makhuwa, Swahili).
Prévost (2009) notes that the verbal inflectional paradigm is relatively poor in spoken French and that the 1\(^{pl}\) is often replaced by the 3\(^{sg}\). The language counts as one of those whose inflectional system is said to be morphologically complex on an enumerative level. It counts a large number of inflected forms, affixes and morphological processes (allomorphic stem selection and affixation). However, French affixation is fairly simple compared to its intricate system of stem allomorphy which, as research have shown, relies on morphomic patterns whose distribution within the paradigm is featurally incoherent. What this means, notwithstanding of course frequency effects, is that in terms of form, the predictability of, say the past participle [
] of the French verb entendre [
] ‘to hear’ based on knowledge of the infinitive form is more difficult, than for instance, predicting the same form of the verb manger ‘to eat’.For example, alternating verb forms are used to mark tense and aspectual distinctions in Louisiana and Guadeloupean Creole. Additional constraints apply in the imp and in the presence of negation in Louisiana Creole (Henri & Klingler, 2014). These two languages have emerged in a context where a variety of French co-exist.
See Aboh (2015), Chap. 3 for a detailed critique.
In fact, it is quite rare for a ‘regular’ French speaker to be able to provide the whole paradigm of a verb on the fly, especially if they are not involved with academia’.
See Muysken and Smith (1986) for a discussion.
DeGraff (2003) interprets the selection of the infinitive in Haitian as the result of acquiring restricted French input.
Aboh (2015) implements a hybrid approach where he argues that genetically-endowed core structures are less likely to be altered through language change compared to functional categories, characterized as abstract tripartite structures with phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic properties. Recombination of a feature essentially implies selection of content properties from one language and syntactic properties from other competing languages provided that this recombination conforms to the underlying universal abstract grammar.
⟶
⟶
⟶
/__
⟶
⟶
/#C__
⟶
] of infinitival forms is more or less phonetically lost in many Northern French dialects. The presence of rhotic ending verbs in synchrony might in fact signal the creation of new forms based on the Old French conjugation pattern ending with a schwa.
/ and /
is leveled to /
/.
] of the French verb entendre [
] ‘to hear’ based on knowledge of the infinitive form is more difficult, than for instance, predicting the same form of the verb manger ‘to eat’.References
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Anne Abeillé and Gregory Stump for their comments and suggestions on this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the suggestions they made to better this paper. All remaining errors and omissions are my own.
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Henri, F. Morphomic structure in Mauritian Kreol: On change, complexity and creolization. Morphology 31, 447–489 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09383-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09383-9