A Comparative Study of the Pronominal System of Romance-Based Creoles.

Abstract

The field of creole studies, which has its roots in the works of nineteenth century Romance linguists, has developed as an independent and legitimate field of investigation for linguists only in the past twenty-five years. Since then, a plethora of works about individual creoles have been published, but very few comparative studies have been conducted. This dissertation is at once an attempt to broaden the scope of comparative studies of creoles by investigating the pronominal systems of French-, Spanish-, and Portuguese-based creoles, and to explain similarities and differences among these and other Indo-European-based creoles in terms of the internal processes of elaboration. After a historical sketch of the development of creole studies and , in particular, of the importance of synchronic studies and the emergence of sociolinguistics, the pronominal system of each group of Romance-based creoles is described and these pronominal systems are compared to one another and to the systems of creoles based on Indo-European languages other than Romance, such as English and Dutch. The results of this comparison confirm the thesis that many features characteristic of creole languages can be attributed neither to a common base nor to a common substratum language, but rather to elaboration, i.e., to internal processes of linguistic evolution.