The genesis of a language : the formation and development of Korlai Portuguese
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The genesis of a language : the formation and development of Korlai Portuguese
（Creole language library, v. 16）
J. Benjamins Pub. Co., c1996
- : us
- : Eur
Available at 21 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Korlai Portuguese (KP), a Portuguese-based creole only recently discovered by linguists, originated around 1520 on the west coast of India. Initially isolated from its Hindu and Muslim neighbors by social and religious barriers, the small Korlai community lost virtually all Portuguese contact as well after 1740. This volume is the first-ever comprehensive treatment of the formation, linguistic components, and rapidly changing situation of this exotic creole.
The product of ten years of research, Korlai Creole Portuguese provides an exciting, in-depth diachronic look at a language that is now showing the strain of intense cultural pressure from the surrounding Marathi-speaking population. Framed in Thomason and Kaufman's 1988 model of contact-induced language change, the author's analysis is enriched by numerous comparisons with sister creoles, apart from medieval Portuguese and Marathi.
This book contrastively examines the following areas:
phonemic inventories, phonological processes, stress assignment, syllable structure, paradigm restructuring, paradigm use, lexicon, word formation, semantic borrowing, loan translations, grammatical relation marking, pre- and postnominal modification, negation, subject and object deletion, embedding, and word order.
Table of Contents
- 1. Sociohistorical and linguistic background of the Chaul-Korlai area
- 2. Description of Korlai Portuguese
- 3. Thomason and Kaufman's model of contact-induced language change
- 4. Phonological systems of Middle Portuguese, Marathi and Korlai Portuguese
- 5. Paradigm Restructuring in Korlai Portuguese
- 6. The Korlai Portuguese lexicon
- 7. General syntactic structure of Middle Portuguese, Marathi, and Korlai Portuguese
- 8. Thoughts on the future of Korlai Portuguese
- 9. Notes
- 10. References
- 11. Appendices
- 12. Index
by "Nielsen BookData"