Variation in the Caribbean: From creole continua to individual agency

285 Pages·2011·19.48 MB·English

by  Lars Hinrichs

CREOLE LANGUAGE LIBRARY VOLUME 37
From creole continua
to individual agency
EDITED BY
Lars Hinrichs
Joseph T. Farquharson
J O HN B ENJAMINS P UBLISHI NG COMPAN Y
Variation in the Caribbean
Creole Language Library (CLL)
A book series presenting descriptive and theoretical studies designed to add
significantly to the data available on pidgin and creole languages.
Editors
Miriam Meyerhoff Umberto Ansaldo
University of Auckland The University of Hong Kong
Editorial Advisory Board
Mervyn C. Alleyne Pieter Muysken
Kingston, Jamaica Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Marlyse Baptista Peter Mtihlhitusler
Ann Arbor, USA Adelaide, Australia
George L Huttar Shobha Satyanath
Dallas, USA Delhi, India
John Holm John Victor Singler
Coirnbra. Portugal New York, USA
Silvia Kouwenberg Norval Smith
Kingston, Jamaica Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Susanne Michaelis Sarah G. Thomason
Leip1ig, Germany Ann Arbor, USA
Sal.ikoko S. Mufwene Tonjes Veenstra
Chicago, USA Berlin, Germany
Volume37
Variation in the Caribbean. From creole continua to individual agency
Edited by Lars Hinrichs and Joseph T. Farquharson
Variation in the Caribbean
From creole continua to individual agency
Edited by
Lars Hinrichs
University of Texas at Austin
Joseph T. Farquharson
University of Technology; Kingston
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam I Philadelphia
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Variation in the Caribbean : From Creole continua to individual agency I edited by Lars
Hinrichs, Joseph T. Farquharson.
p. em. (Creole Language Library; ISSN 091.0-901.6 ; v. 37)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Creole dialects, English--Caribbean Area--Social aspects. 2. Language and languages
-Variation. 3· Languages in contact. 4· Sociolinguistics--Caribbean Area. I.
Hinrichs, Lars. II. Farquharson, Joseph T.
PM7874·C27V37 2011
41.7:9729--dc1.2 2010043364
ISBN 9;711 90 272 5259 3 (Hb ; alk. paper)
ISBN 9;78 90 272 8739 7 (Eb)
© 2011-John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co.· P.O. Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam· The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America· P.O. Box 27519 ·Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • usA
Table of contents
Introduction 1
Lars Hinrichs & Joseph T. Farquharson
PART 1. Variation and linguistic systems
Revisiting variation between sa and o in Sranan 13
Donald Winford
Inherent variability and coexistent systems: Negation in Bequia 39
James A. Wa.lker e!"' Jack Sidnell
Putting individuals back in contact:
Accommodation strategies by Barbadians in Ipswich 57
Michelle C. Bra.fia-Straw
Relative markers in spoken Standard Jamaican English 79
Ulrike Gut
PART 11. Variation and identity
"Flying at half-mast"? Voices, genres,
and orthographies in Barbadian Creole 107
Ja.nina Fenigsen
The creole continuum and individual agency: Approaches to
stylistic variation in Jamaica 133
Dagmar Deuber
Language attitudes and linguistic awareness in Jamaican English 16}
And1·ea Sand
VI Variation in the Carlbbean
PART III. Variation and the community
The varilingual repertoire ofTobagonian speakers 191
Valerie Youssef
On the emergence of new language varieties: The case of the
Eastern Maroon Creole in French Guiana
Bettina Migge & Isabelle Uglise
'Creole' and youth language in a British inner-city community 231
c...
Susa.n Dray Mark Sebba
Le Page's theoretical and applied legacy in
sociolinguistics and creole studies 251
John R. Rickfoni
Name index 273
Subject index 275
Introduction
Lars Hinrichs & Joseph T. Farquharson
Creole studies and Caribbean linguistics have always been closely linked with each
other. Much influential theory on pidgin and creole languages, as well as a signifi
cant portion of descriptive work. emerged from work on this part of the world. For
example, a clear majority of the papers contained in the seminal collection edited
by Hymes (1971), Pidginization and Creolization ofL anguages, draw on empirical
facts and data from the Caribbean. In the same volume, Hymes and contributors
showed that they considered the study of variation as a constitutive sub field of cre
ole linguistics by allotting to it one of the book's six sections, "Variation and use: a
range of English-linked cases" (297-419). John Rickford even asserts: "If one were
to ask what sub field of linguistics the study of pidgins and creoles was most closely
associated with, the most likely answer would be sociolinguistics" (1988: 51).
The 1971 Hymes volume, and the 1968 conference from which it emerged,
fundamentally shaped creole linguistics and the way it would come to be practiced
in the decades to come. At the initial stages, the field drew considerable energy
from a sense that it had the potential to fill in some of the blind spots that the study
oflanguage in the Chomskian paradigm was seen to be developing - and the study
of variation was located at a particularly important nexus in that endeavor
(Kouwenberg & Singler 2008). In Hymes's formulation,
Unguists wishing to treat their w01k as referring to an ideally fluent speaker-lis
tener in a homogeneous speech community (Chomsky 1965) often can ignore
variability as peripheral. In these cases [i.e. in creole speech communities] vari
ability is central. (Hymes 1971: 300)
The motivating and unifying power of these calls to theoretical-syntactic arms in
creole language studies has waned.1 Instead, creolists are now engaging sociolin
guistic questions as worthwhile objects of study in their own right, not as a weapon
in the struggle between formal and empirical linguistics.
1. Compared to the idealism of Hymes and other creole sociolinguists of the first hour, Peter
Patrick (2008) recently spoke of the relationship between variationist creole linguistics and
transformational syntax in rather more matter-of-fact tones.
2 Lars Hinrichs & Joseph T. Farquharson
Caribbean sociolinguistics looks back on a history of considerable achieve
ment, which includes substantial impact on sociolinguistics in general (see papers
in Rickford, ed., 1988). Since creoles rarely exist without other language varieties
being present in the same sociolinguistic space, from which they usually are very
different structurally, creole-speaking communities often make the relations be
tween grammar, variation, and social context visible in particularly stark relief As
a result, theoretical models have emerged from the study of creoles that have been
widely adopted by sociolinguists for non -creole settings. By causing us to re-think
how we approach the social and cognitive organization of different grammatical
systems in one community, the field has yielded, for example, a formulation of
implicationally scaled vernacular-standard continua (DeCamp 1971; Rickford
1987; Escure 1997), and the Acts ofidentity model (LePage and Tabouret-Keller
1985), both of which have been widely influential. Patrick (2008) also points out
that research on creoles (especially on the creole origins of African -American Ver
nacular English) has played a considerable role in establishing and developing the
VARBRUL framework, a multivariate statistical method that dominated quantita
tive sociolinguistics in the 1980s and 1990s, as a disciplinary standard.2
Though it is creole linguistics that has traditionally been most naturally inter
ested in Caribbean languages, the somewhat younger study of English as a World
Language is now equally engaged in the study of Caribbean variation. Through its
focus, then, this volume intentionally unites scholars from several sub-branches of
linguistics. The varieties it covers include both creoles and local standard varieties,
and while a majority of the varieties discussed are English-based, creoles involving
other lexifiers are also addressed. Thereby, and by including a look at diasporic
Caribbean varieties (Braiia-Straw; Dray and Sebba), the volume reflects the
breadth of topics and approaches in current work on Caribbean variation. The
subtitle, "From creole continua to individual agency," acknowledges the range of
theoretical and methodological approaches that these works take to the linguistic
variation which exists in Caribbean speech communities.
For a long time, discussions of (post-)creole continua in a variationist frame
work and continuum theory have dominated Caribbean sociolinguistics. Mean
while, general variation studies underwent a profound reorientation, or rather:
addition of interests, turning to language and identity as well as pursuing micro
approaches to variation. This shift in interests has been referred to as the "interac
tional turn" in sociolinguistics. While linguistic anthropology engaged concepts
2. For introductions to the variable rule (VARBRUL) framework and the GoldVarb software
Implementation see fur example Cedergren and Sankoff (1974), Bayley (2002), and Tagliamonte
(2006). Bayley's article includes a helpful dosing section on future directions in research using
variable rules (Bayley 2002: 134-136). For a critique of the statistical method see Johnson (2009).
Introduction 3
like individual identity/agency and language ideology as factors in variation con
siderablyearlier than sociolinguistics, the latter adopted them from the early 1980s
onward. A culmination of this development has been the adoption of ethnograph
ic approaches and concepts by sociolinguists who were trained in the macro-vari
ationist, Labovian tradition.3 A major theoretical stepping stone in this develop
ment came right out of creole linguistics: Le Page and Tabouret-Keller's Acts of
Identity (1985). For a variety of reasons, however, this model had a lesser effect on
the field of creole linguistics than on the rest of sociolinguistics, where it facilitated
and supported studies of variation in a non-stratified, identity-based framework
(Mair 2003a).
This volume, as well as the 2006 workshop at the Sociolinguistics Symposium
in Limerick from which it sprang, is intended as a place for Caribbean data to meet
with the broadest possible range of sociolinguistic approaches to variation, which
includes a chance to introduce very recent sociolinguistic thinking. That spirit is
reflected in the selection of papers.
The first group of papers looks at variation in linguistic features, with three
papers devoted to (morpho-)syntax (Winford, Walker and Sidnell, and Gut) and
one to phonological variation in diasporic dialect contact (Brafta-Straw).
Don Winford addresses an issue of purported variation in Sranan: sa and o
have both been analyzed as future markers, but the question of their interchange
ability has so far been unresolved. Winford uses historical writings on Sranan as
well as native speaker judgments to work out the semantic differences between
both markers in different contexts.
Walker and Sidnell address negation in one Caribbean setting from a classic
variationist standpoint: binary variation analysis in the VARBRUL framework.
Their contribution shows the power of such analysis in the study of an issue fre
quently faced by Caribbeanists: island-internal variation. The grammatical envi
ronment of their response variables lends support to a view of Bequia as a setting
that features co-existing systems.
Michelle Brafta-Straw's paper expands this volume's geographical scope to the
Caribbean diaspora. In an analysis of the speech of Barbadians in Ipswitch (UK),
she presents in detail the effects of a new majority accent on an immigrant com
munitfs vowel system. She demonstrates that the outcome of immigrants' dialect
contact, rather than taking place on a simple continuum between accommodation
and maintenance, is complicated both by phonological mechanics and the social
dynamics of the diaspora. There, Caribbean varieties compete for social status in
ways that differ from those in native contexts: the great symbolic load of}amaican
3· Key publications in this type of ethnographic variation studies include Eckert (2000),
Fought (2003), Zhang (2005; 2008), and Mendoza-Denton (2008).