Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Introduction ⇫ ¶

A striking feature of many creole languages is that words denoting physical and psychological states such as ‘ripe’, ‘sick’, ‘fat’, ‘red’, or ‘know’ when combined with progressive or completive aspect markers, can take on an inchoative meaning, i.e. a sense of becoming. This is illustrated in (1a) for a marker that otherwise expressed progressive aspect (cf. 1b), and in (2a) for a marker that otherwise expresses completive aspect (cf. 2b).

That this feature, which is absent from the European lexifiers, occurs in Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and Pacific creoles was noted by Bickerton (1981: 69). Note that it does not matter for this feature whether the state words are classified as “adjectives” or as “verbs”.

2. The values ⇫ ¶

We distinguish five mutually exclusive types:

	No inchoative meaning with aspect markers	33
	Inchoative expressed by progressive marker	20
	Inchoative expressed by completive marker	9
	Inchoative expressed by progressive and completive markers	10
	No aspect markers	1
Representation:		73

Slightly less than half of the languages have aspect markers that lack the inchoative meaning (value 1), and one language lacks aspect markers entirely (value 5). A progressive marker has inchoative meaning far more frequently than a completive marker. About one third of the languages with this feature have both progressive and completive markers with inchoative meaning (value 4).

3. Aspect markers do not express inchoative meaning ⇫ ¶

Where aspect markers cannot express the inchoative meaning, this is generally expressed by ‘become’ verbs, as in (3)-(4).

Overt progressive or imperfective markers are usually not used with state words in these languages, but occasionally they can be used (also alongside the copula) and then have habitual meaning, as in Cape Verdean Creole (and similarly in Guadeloupean and Martinican Creole):

4. Inchoative meaning expressed by progressive marker ⇫ ¶

Another example of value 2 is given in (6).

Progressive markers that have inchoative meaning with state words occur widely in Atlantic creoles, and also sporadically elsewhere. It should be noted that the progressive marker need not express progressive meaning exclusively, but can also have other meanings (which may even be more prominent than the progressive meaning, see Chapter 47).

This pattern has been attributed to West African substrate influence, e.g. by Migge (2003: 87), who cites the following Gbe example:

5. Inchoative meaning expressed by completive marker ⇫ ¶

Somewhat less commonly than progressive markers, completive markers may have inchoative meaning (value 3).

In addition to typical completive markers (often based on done in English-based languages and on acabar ‘finish’ in Ibero-Romance-based languages), which put special emphasis on the completion of an event, perfect and perfective markers may be used in this way as well. Thus, Seychelles Creole (i)n (as in (2) above) is generally a perfect marker, and in Korlai, the ordinary perfective past tense can be used with inchoative meaning:

Korlai forms like sabew are inherited from the Portuguese lexifier, where the perfective past tense also has inchoative meaning with some state verbs. So conservative cases like (10) are rather different from cases like (8)-(9), which represent innovations vis-à-vis the lexifier. However, since completive and perfective forms are difficult to distinguish in a general way, they have been lumped together here.

Languages with a completive marker with inchoative meaning are found in the Caribbean and West Africa, but also outside this region. At least in languages that have been in contact with Chinese, this pattern can be attributed to Chinese influence. For example, in Singlish, the completive marker already is used in much the same way as Hokkien liau (corresponding to Mandarin le), and this in turn corresponds to Singapore Bazaar Malay sudah.

For the Atlantic creoles, the source of the completive marker with inchoative meaning is not equally clear. But it is striking that languages where both a progressive marker and a completive marker have inchoative meaning occur only in West Africa and the Caribbean.

6. The nature of the state words ⇫ ¶

For the classification of our languages, we simply asked whether the inchoative effect occurs at all, not whether it occurs with all state words. There seems to be considerable variability in this regard. For example, in Jamaican, im de taiyad (with the progressive marker de) means ‘He is becoming tired’, but di bwai de bad means ‘the boy is being bad’, not ‘the boy is becoming bad’ (Farquharson 2013). In Louisiana Creole (see 6), only a few state words such as fatige ‘tired’ and choke ‘angry’ allow this meaning of the marker ape.

For this feature, we have assumed that the variation between languages concerns the meaning of the progressive markers, but one might also look at it differently, from the point of view of the meaning of the “state words”: It might be that at least in some languages, the meaning of words that translate as ‘tired’, ‘ripe’, ‘big’, ‘wet’ and so on is not a state meaning, but a dynamic meaning, i.e. these words really mean ‘become tired’, ‘ripen’, ‘become big’, ‘become wet’, etc. The inchoative meaning with progressive and completive markers would thus not be surprising, because it is the basic meaning of the words. The state meaning (‘is tired’, ‘is ripe’, ‘is wet’, etc.) arises in a perfect(ive) context, and perfective is of course often expressed by zero: As we saw in the preceding chapter, unmarked dynamic verbs often have past (perfective) reference. A clear example of this is the word wô in Principense: Bana sê sa wô [plantain the prog ripen] means ‘The plaintain is ripening’, and the state ‘The plantain is ripe’ is expressed by the zero-marked perfective aspect: Bana sê Ø wô [plantain the pfv ripen] ‘The plantain (has) ripened (i.e. is ripe)’ (Maurer 2013c). The word wô cannot be used attributively by itself, but needs the participial suffix -du (bana wôdu ‘ripe banana’). According to Migge (2003: 87), a similar situation is found in Nengee and Gbe, and probably more widely in Atlantic creoles.