The Department of French & Italian presents a Horizons of Knowledge lecture by
Claire Lefebvre
A Theory of Creole Genesis
Friday, November 30, 2007
3:00 pm
Oak Room, IMU
Abstract: The most intriguing question about creole languages is no doubt that of how they come about. Since creole languages are natural languages, it must be possible to formulate a theory of their origin within the framework of the processes that play a role in language creation and language change in general. This is the assumption that I had in mind when I first started working on the problem of creole genesis in the early eighties.
The first part of my talk will outline the theory that we developed within the aforementioned framework. This theory involves the process of relexification or relabelling, as well as the processes of levelling, grammaticalisation, reanalysis, lexical diffusion and innovation. The second part of the talk will summarise the various dimensions of a valid test of this theory. On the basis of data drawn from various creole languages, the third part of the talk will illustrate how the various processes interact in creole genesis and development. The fourth part will show that the proposed theory can account for all the features that characterise the emergence and early development of a creole language, and it will discuss the consequences of the findings.
About the Speaker: Claire Lefebvre is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Language Pedagogy and director of the Institut des Sciences cognitives at the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM). She is a specialist in the origins of creole languages, including fongbe (West Africa), quechua (Peru) and creole (Haiti). She has published several books on linguistic topics including Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science (Editor, with Henry Cohen, Elsevier press, 2005), L’ethnolinguistique: l’état des lieux [Numéro spécial]. (Editor, with Christine Jourdan, Anthropologie et Sociétés press, 1999), Issues in the Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages (John Benjamins, 2004), and A Grammar of Fongbe (Mouton DeGruyter, 2002).
Sponsors: Mary-Margaret Barr Koon fund of the Department of French and Italian, Dean of the Faculties, Department of Linguistics, and the Department of Second Language Studies
If you have a disability and need assistance, accommodations can be made to meet most needs. Please call 855-5458.
