Creole Morphosyntax

Catalog description

`Creole’ languages are linguistic by-products of the historical events triggered by colonization and the slave trade between mainly Africa and the newly colonized world. These languages arose from language acquisition in the specific social settings defined by the history of contact between mainly African and European peoples in 17th/18th-century colonies. During the course, we also consider other language varieties that have emerged in similar sociohistorical settings. In this course, we explore and evaluate theories of creolization from a cognitive, historical and comparative perspective through a comprehensive survey of morphosyntactic phenomena in various contact languages including topics such as determiner allomorphy and other form alternations across nominal and verbal domains, TAM constructions and the evolution of inflectional paradigms, serial verb constructions, negation and negative concord, among others. Our discussions will also address the contribution of the emergence of creole languages on our understanding of language acquisition and language change. This course is the same as LIN 422 and course repeat rules will apply.  Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirements.