Talk by Silvia Terenghi at Anglia Ruskin-Cambridge Romance Linguistics Seminar

On Thursday 3 December, Silvia Terenghi will give a talk entitled Demonstrative systems in Portuguese-based creoles: Some markedness considerations for the ARU-Cambridge Romance Linguistics Seminar.

The seminar will take place on Zoom (Zoom ID: 928 5479 4852). If you wish to attend please email Silvia Terenghi for the passcode.

Abstract

Demonstrative systems in Portuguese-based creoles typically retain the lexical forms attested in the original Portuguese demonstrative paradigms. However, they tend to result from a semantic reduction, whereby the ternary deictic opposition present in Portuguese (este, esse, aquele) can be lost, in favour of a new binary opposition centred on the location of the speaker in the context.
In this talk, I provide a contrastive description of the demonstrative systems attested in the Portuguese-based creoles reported in the APiCS (Michaelis et al.2013, Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures) and in their lexifiers. I focus in particular on the attested mismatch between the semantic uniformity of the resulting systems and their morphological variation.
I then explore some possible explanations for the observed patterns of change and examine the role of markedness in accounting for the evolution of demonstrative systems. While the data presented here (on a par with other contact data and with diachronic data) seem to support a straightforward markedness-based approach, I take stock with the concept of markedness in morphosyntax and with its employment as explanans and suggest that rather, as things stand, markedness is only a descriptive device and its application beyond description an explanandum. I conclude by putting forward some initial thoughts that could provide at the same time a more robust definition and a principled explanation for markedness and that could account for demonstrative data considered in contact contexts and in diachrony alike.