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1.1. Background In an important study first presented as a conference paper 25 years ago, Ferreira (1984) brought to the notice of scholars of Brazilian rural dialects what she termed" remanescentes de um dialeto... more
1.1. Background In an important study first presented as a conference paper 25 years ago, Ferreira (1984) brought to the notice of scholars of Brazilian rural dialects what she termed" remanescentes de um dialeto crioulo"('traces of a creole dialect') in an Afro-Brazilian ...
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Research Interests: Philosophy and Plural
Earlier linguistic research suggested that Malacca Creole Portuguese (MCP) had existed without diglossia with Portuguese ever since the Dutch conquest of Portuguese Malacca in 1642, yet it had experienced some contact with Portuguese in... more
Earlier linguistic research suggested that Malacca Creole Portuguese (MCP) had existed without diglossia with Portuguese ever since the Dutch conquest of Portuguese Malacca in 1642, yet it had experienced some contact with Portuguese in the 19th and 20th centuries. The present study adds significantly to this discussion. It considers a range of information from sociohistorical studies and archival sources (including linguistic data) relating to the Dutch (1642–1795, 1818–1823) and early British (1795–1818, 1823–1884) colonial periods. For the Dutch period, it is seen that contact with other Creole Portuguese communities is likely to have persisted for some time. Most significant, however, is the finding that 19th century texts in Portuguese and creole Portuguese, recently identified in archival sources in London and Graz, show that Portuguese continued to be part of the Malacca sociolinguistic setting until the early British period, and that missionary Indo-Portuguese also had a pre...
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Malacca Portuguese Creole (MPC) (ISO 639-3; code: mcm), popularly known as Malacca Portuguese or locally as (Papiá) Cristang, belongs to the group of Portuguese-lexified creoles of (South)east Asia, which includes the extinct varieties of... more
Malacca Portuguese Creole (MPC) (ISO 639-3; code: mcm), popularly known as Malacca Portuguese or locally as (Papiá) Cristang, belongs to the group of Portuguese-lexified creoles of (South)east Asia, which includes the extinct varieties of Batavia/Tugu (Maurer 2013) and Bidau, East Timor (Baxter 1990), and the moribund variety of Macau (Baxter 2009). MPC has its origins in the Portuguese presence in Malacca, and like the other creoles in this subset, it is genetically related to the Portuguese Creoles of South Asia (Holm 1988, Cardoso, Baxter & Nunes 2012).
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This paper examines the vowel system of present day Malacca Portuguese Creole (MPC) or Kristang, based on recordings from interviews with five female native speakers of MPC. A total of 1083 monophthongs were extracted from the recordings.... more
This paper examines the vowel system of present day Malacca Portuguese Creole (MPC) or Kristang, based on recordings from interviews with five female native speakers of MPC. A total of 1083 monophthongs were extracted from the recordings. The first and second formants of these vowels were measured and analysed. Considerable variation was found within and between the speakers in the way each of the vowels was produced. There were also noticeable overlaps between /i/ and /e/ suggesting that they were being used interchangeably. The quality of some of the vowels found in this study was also found to be different from those previously described. Based on the reduced vowel inventory, the variation in the way that vowels are produced, and the overlaps between vowels, the findings suggest the possibility of phonological instability of this endangered language.
Research Interests: History, Portuguese, Linguistics, Language, Vowels, and 3 moreAcoustic, Kristang, and Creole Language
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Page 347. Portuguese and Creole Portuguese in the Pacific and Western Pacific rim Alan N. Baxter The relevant map is listed at the end of this text. 1. Overview The Portuguese language is currently used in one location in the ...
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The chapter discusses the post-nominal genitive present in many varieties of Asian Creole Portuguese and derived from a Portuguese prenominal possessive. The text builds on Clements' Malabar Pidgin Portuguese hypothesis, and... more
The chapter discusses the post-nominal genitive present in many varieties of Asian Creole Portuguese and derived from a Portuguese prenominal possessive. The text builds on Clements' Malabar Pidgin Portuguese hypothesis, and Dalgado's vision of an easterly spread of Indo-Portuguese features. The role of Dravidian substrate in genitive restructuring is stressed. Possessives in 6 varieties of Asian Creole Portuguese are compared and a grammaticalization path for the post-nominal genitive is proposed. The extension of post-nominal genitives to further inter-NP functions is discussed, focusing on the creoles of Korlai and Malacca. Some extended post-nominal genitive functions may represent early Indo-Portuguese Pidgin/Creole use. Quantitative analysis of post-nominal genitive in Malacca Creole reveals a preference for + HUM possessors, and traits of a 3rd person prenominal possessive typical of 16th-century Portuguese. This suggests early consolidation of the structure.
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This paper is concerned with the nature of etymological gender inflection in Malacca Creole Portuguese and its place in the diachrony of the language. The discussion considers pairs of items with etymological gender inflection and human... more
This paper is concerned with the nature of etymological gender inflection in Malacca Creole Portuguese and its place in the diachrony of the language. The discussion considers pairs of items with etymological gender inflection and human referents. Speaker intuitions of the word-pair vitality are assessed by word recognition and judgments of the acceptability of test words in specific syntactic contexts. The items surveyed are initially contemplated as a type of derivational morphology. Subsequently, the question is posed as to whether this etymological gender morphology could have a contextual dimension, and it is observed that some limited traces thereof may be found. The incorporation and retention of etymological gender inflection is attributed to second language input to the creole, involving early second language lexical and phrasal development, influenced by a combination of communication pragmatics, salience, and potential Indian substrate features. It is suggested that such ...
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Abstract: Variation in subject-verb agreement is widely observed in Brazilian Portuguese and it is one among many features in the language indicative of a history influenced by processes of irregular-language transmission (Baxter &... more
Abstract: Variation in subject-verb agreement is widely observed in Brazilian Portuguese and it is one among many features in the language indicative of a history influenced by processes of irregular-language transmission (Baxter & Lucchesi 1997; Baxter 1998; ...
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This research examines the growth of variable plural (PL) agreement in the noun phrase (NP) of the restructured Portuguese of the Tongas, descendants of Africans contracted on the Monte Café plantation of São Tomé in the 19th and 20th... more
This research examines the growth of variable plural (PL) agreement in the noun phrase (NP) of the restructured Portuguese of the Tongas, descendants of Africans contracted on the Monte Café plantation of São Tomé in the 19th and 20th centur-ies. I first provide a sketch of the sociohistorical background of the speech commu-nity, stressing that its Portuguese was acquired in a special contact situation along with simultaneous acquisition of Umbundu. Subsequently I present the results of a VARBRUL analysis of plural NP items based on data collected from three age groups, the oldest age group consisting of first-and second-generation speakers born on the plantation. Four conditioning factors are examined: (1) morphopho-nological saliency of the plural word; (2) the following phonological context; (3) the form class of the plural item and its position within the NP; and (4) whether inform-ants had at least one African parent, or locally-born parents. Particular attention is paid to the...
This paper discusses a variety of Southeast Asian Creole Portuguese (henceforth SACP) formerly spoken in Bidau, Dili, East Timor. An outline of the sociohistorical setting of the language is followed by a discussion of data sources and... more
This paper discusses a variety of Southeast Asian Creole Portuguese (henceforth SACP) formerly spoken in Bidau, Dili, East Timor. An outline of the sociohistorical setting of the language is followed by a discussion of data sources and references to Bidau Creole Portuguese (BCP) in the literature on Timor. Included is a discussion of an unpublished letter from the Vigário Geral of Timor to Hugo Schuchardt, containing a comparative list of sentences in "corrupt Portuguese," Metropolitan Portuguese, and Tetum. The body of the paper is concerned with the analysis and description of a limited and fragmentary corpus that was tape recorded in the early 1950s by the Missao Antropológica de Timor. These materials, together with the available written sources, permit a preliminary account of certain aspects of the phonology (the sequence V + [ng], palatal affricates, [r], and reflexes of Old Portuguese /ei/ and /l/) and the morphosyn-tax of the creole (the NP, the genetive possessiv...
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This paper examines variation in the noun phrase gender agreement rule in the Afro-Brazilian Portuguese dialect of Helvétia. The analysis of the variation proceeds within a quantitative framework; it considers structural implications, in... more
This paper examines variation in the noun phrase gender agreement rule in the Afro-Brazilian Portuguese dialect of Helvétia. The analysis of the variation proceeds within a quantitative framework; it considers structural implications, in generative terms, and sociolinguistic aspects, yielding evidence relevant to the definition of the postcreole nature of the dialect. Structural parallels are found with Portuguese L1 acquisition and with varieties of creole Portuguese, and the relationship of the Helvétia dialect to more standard varieties of Brazilian Portuguese is clarified. An evaluation of structural variables reveals how the gender agreement rule is being incorporated into the grammar of the dialect at different rates along different structural paths and in different pragmatic functions, reflecting intricacies of the grammar associated with the noun. Finally, a scrutiny of the effect of extralinguistic variables on gender agreement clearly reveals the acquisitional nature of th...
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As análises reunidas neste livro abrem uma importante frente para a pesquisa sobre a história linguística do Brasil. Por um lado, desviam o foco da língua da elite letrada para as variedades linguísticas usadas pela grande maioria da... more
As análises reunidas neste livro abrem uma importante frente para a pesquisa sobre a história linguística do Brasil. Por um lado, desviam o foco da língua da elite letrada para as variedades linguísticas usadas pela grande maioria da população, variedades historicamente ...
The area of Bidau, in the East Timorese capital of Dili, was home to the only documented form of Creole Portuguese in Timor. Although Bidau Creole Portuguese is now extinct, by most accounts, a few scattered records allow a glimpse into... more
The area of Bidau, in the East Timorese capital of Dili, was home to the only documented form of Creole Portuguese in Timor. Although Bidau Creole Portuguese is now extinct, by most accounts, a few scattered records allow a glimpse into what it must have been like, and reveal its clear relationship with other Southeast Asian Portuguese-based creoles; Baxter’s (1990a) study of Bidau Creole Portuguese was based mostly on a set of recordings made in the context of the Missão Antropológica de Timor [“Anthropological Mission to Timor”, 1953–1954]. In this article, Baxter (1990a: 3) mentions that “[s]o far, the earliest located reference to Bidau Creole Portuguese, and one which contains some impressionistic examples of conversations and the verse of a song, is Castro (1943: 56, 177)”. However, since the publication of this study, a few earlier references to what can be interpreted as Portuguese-based creole in Timor have been located in unpublished archival sources. These sources are let...