Colloque - Syntactic Cartography and African Languages : How Language Contact Accounts for Mixed Typologies

Luigi RizziLinguistique généraleCollège de FranceAnnée 2023-2024Colloque - Syntactic Cartography and African Languages : How Language Contact Accounts for Mixed TypologiesColloque organisé par Luigi Rizzi, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire linguistique généraleAvec le soutien de la Fondation du Collège de France.Salikoko S. Mufwene, Université de Chicago, professeur invité du Collège de FranceFew languages exhibit uniform patterns regarding the position of (suconstituents, hence the ensuing syntactic configurations, for example, the position of the verb relative to its arguments, the position of various determiners, and the position of modifiers of nouns. Based on what has been learned from the emergence of creoles' structures, one must wonder whether this is not the case also in their lexifiers, which are themselves also outcomes of language contact. What has traditionally been characterized as simplification of the morphosyntax in creoles amounts to mere typological realignment in contact situations where selection from among competing variants is driven by various language-ecological factors. I will adduce examples from English, French, Bantu and related "creoles" to illustrate my hypothesis.