Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Independent personal pronouns and dependent person forms ⇫ ¶

All (or virtually all) languages have independent personal pronouns, i.e. personal pronouns ('I', 'you', 'he/she', 'we', 'you (pl)', 'they' etc.) that can occur on their own, or at least not combined intimately with a verb. Some typical contexts where such independent personal pronouns occur are given in (1-4).

In all of these contexts, the personal pronouns are singled out in some way. We find separate words that are independent pronouns (or "free pronouns", "strong pronouns") in this sense in all the APiCS languages.

In addition, some languages also have dependent person forms, which always occur together with a verb (or sometimes another host). They cannot occur on their own as in (1), in coordination as in (2), or in focusing constructions as in (3)-(4). Their position with respect to their host is quite rigid, and they are often described as bound elements (clitics or affixes). Thus, the person markers in a language like Portuguese (cant-o 'I sing', canta-s 'you sing', canta-mos 'we sing', etc.) are also dependent person forms in this sense. Whether they can cooccur with a coreferential full NP or an independent pronoun is irrelevant here, though in most of the APiCS languages, this is not possible (in this regard, they differ from Portuguese). Dependent person forms on verbs are also called verbal person markers (Siewierska 2005c), or as argument indexes (Lazard 1998, Haspelmath 2012+). In this chapter, we are concerned both with dependent subject forms (as in 5a-b) and dependent object forms (as in 6a-b).

This chapter distinguishes four feature values, with just a single choice being possible.

	No dependent person forms	29
	Only dependent subject forms	19
	Only dependent object forms	1
	Dependent subject and object forms	26
Representation:		75

2. Languages lacking dependent person forms ⇫ ¶

Many APiCS languages lack dependent person forms and use the same (independent) pronouns in contexts like (1)-(4) and in contexts like (5)-(6). Some examples are given in (7)-(8), where the first example shows the “independent use” of the pronoun, while the second example shows the “dependent use” of the pronoun.

This lack of special dependent person forms is particularly characteristic of pidgins (Chinese Pidgin English, Chinese Pidgin Russian, Eskimo Pidgin, Fanakalo, Pidgin Hawaiian, Pidgin Hindustani, Yimas-Arafundi Pidgin), which never preserve the dependent person forms of the lexifier language. But there are also quite a few creoles which lack special dependent person forms. Typically, both in pidginization and in creolization, the dependent person forms (such as the Portuguese endings -o, -s, -mos etc., or the French clitics je, tu, il, le, les, etc.) are not preserved from the lexifier language, resulting in languages of the first type.

3. Languages with only dependent subject forms ⇫ ¶

If a language has any dependent person forms, it is very likely that these are subject forms. This is a very general trend (Siewierska 2005c: 414), and it is also true of the APiCS set, where 16 languages have dependent subject forms but no special dependent object forms. However, normally there is not a full set of dependent subject forms. Most of the languages have special forms only for part of the paradigm, especially for the 3rd person forms, and/or for the 1st and 2nd person singular. Two exemplary paradigms are shown in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1. Jamaican (Farquharson 2013)

Table 2. Palenquero (Schwegler 2013)

Usually, the dependent forms are originally reduced forms of the independent forms, which explains why they are especially frequent for subject forms and for singular forms (these are the most frequent contexts, and reduction is conditioned by frequency).

Lingala, which has preserved the Bantu person subject prefixes, is exceptional in that it has a full paradigm (dependent subject forms na-, o-, a/e-; to-, bo-, ba/e-; contrasting with independent/object pronouns ngáí, yó, yé/yangó; bísó, bínó, bangó/yangó).

4. Languages with only dependent object forms ⇫ ¶

There is only one language which has special dependent object forms, but no special dependent subject forms, Bahamian Creole (see Table 3, where the three special dependent object forms are in boldface).

Table 3. Bahamian Creole (Hackert 2013)

5. Languages with both dependent subject forms and dependent object forms ⇫ ¶

Quite a few languages have both dependent subject forms and dependent object forms. An example is Guinea-Bissau Kriyol (Table 4). Here it is clear that the independent pronouns were recreated with an initial element a- that is absent in the independent pronouns of its lexifier Portuguese.

Table 4: Guinea-Bissau Kriyol (Intumbo et al. 2013)

In other languages, the difference is less drastic, e.g. in Pichi, the dependent forms (subject forms à, yù, è; wì, ùna/ùnu, dɛ̀n) differ mostly by their low tone from the independent pronouns (mi, yu, in; wi, ùna/ùnu, dɛn). The latter are also used as object forms, except that for the 3sg, there is an alternative low-tone form àn. In Haitian Creole, the independent forms always have a full syllable (mwen, wou, li; nou, nou, yo), while the dependent forms are reduced to a single consonant when they are adjacent to a vowel (m, w, l; n, n, y).