Panels

The 2020 summer conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics will feature the following four panels: 

Panel 1: Creole lexicography (Convenor: Bettina Migge)

Panel 2: Creoles in multilingual settings: the role of language ideologies and variation (Convenor: Isabelle Léglise)

This panel aims to investigate the dynamics of multilingual settings in the Global South involving creole languages through two big strands in sociolinguistic and anthropological research put together: the role of language ideologies and the analysis of variation in language use. We will discuss various uses of the notion of language ideologies linked to the analysis of variation as meaningful resources in our fields. Linguistic resources that may have several indexical meanings will be one of the key concepts here as well as different language ideologies at play occurring at various (local, regional, national, transnational) levels at the same time. Panelists will address issues such as ethnolinguistic variation and emergence of language varieties linked to identity preservation and migratory trajectories for example, or shift in linguistic prestige through the commodification of a creole or pidgin variety, or multiplex patterns of prestige linked to cultural values such as resistance towards standardization or transnational popular culture. It is our hope that the discussion will give rise to theoretical and epistemological perspectives with regard to dominant models in creole studies and linear views on language contact and variation in multilingual settings.

Panel 3: Tree banks for emerging languages (Convenors: Bernard Caron and Stefano Manfredi)

The workshop will address the following question: how to build a treebank for the study of emerging languages, especially when spoken by a large number of speakers in a large country?

As it develops in terms of status and functions, an emerging language expands geographically and is exposed to vernacular languages belonging to different genetic and typological groups. Through this process, does it undergo a degree of contact-induced variation beyond the odd word borrowed from these vernacular languages or, on the contrary, does a standard variety emerge under the influence of modern media such as radio, television and video? In its functional expansion, the emerging language is subject to considerable contact and influence from its original lexicon, which is often the dominant formal and official language where it is spoken. Despite the influence of the lexicon and indigenous languages, does the emerging language retain its existence as a discrete language or does it undergo a "decreolization", which results in what has been described as a post-creole continuum (Rickford 1987)? The influence of the written form of the lexicon needs particular attention. The extension of the emerging language to more formal uses such as radio programmes (reports, political and news programmes), podcast blogs, news writing, exposes this emerging language to the influence of the lexifier written language. Radio reports are usually translated from press releases published in the dominant languages (e.g. English or French) by news agencies. Podcast blogs are read from written texts. This new dimension is bound to influence the structure of the emerging language. In summary, emerging languages are expected to exhibit instability, as well as diachronic, diatopic, diastratic and gender variations. All these elements pose serious challenges to any attempt to characterize the nature and variation of these languages.

The workshop will showcase the ANR project NaijaSynCor, a corpus study of linguistic variation organized around a Naija syntactic tree. Naija is a new language that has developed in Nigeria as a pidgincreole (Bakker 2008) since the country's independence in 1960. Spoken in Nigeria and in its diaspora by about 100 million speakers (mainly L2), it can be shown to be different from Nigerian Pidgin (a creole spoken in the Niger Delta region and Ajegunle district in Lagos) and the Nigerian variety of English.

The NSC is building a 500,000 word oral reference corpus collected from 11 different survey points in the country, with a 150,000 word deeply annotated sub-section for syntax and prosody (the Naija prosodic and syntactic Treebank). The Naija corpus is compared to the Nigerian International Corpus of English (ICE Nigeria), both qualitatively and quantitatively. It studies the variations of Naija on the formal-informal functional scale through the study of its use in the media (radio reports, editorials, news, etc.) and in private and semi-formal situations. It studies the patterns observed in the prosody of emerging languages, and links the prosodic description of Naija to that of its grammatical and information structures through the use of NLP tools.

The papers presented at the workshop will present the methodology of the NaijaSynCor project and the problems encountered during the project, demonstrate the NLP tools developed to process the large amounts of oral data, their transcription and metadata, and show some results obtained in the study of linguistic variation, prosody and syntax.

Panel 4: French-based Creole languages: grammar and communication (Convenor: Philipp Krämer)

The contributions to this panel focus on areas of research which so far remain understudied in French creolistics: the interplay between language structures and language use in communication, as personal interaction embedded in social realities. The panel will cover the grammar-pragmatics interplay in the domains of deixis and directive speech acts as well as the structural effects of Creole-Lexifier contact in a communicative setting where both language are socially relevant. Furthermore, the panel will look into account the specific context of linguistic structures in electronic communication and their implications for data-driven research. With this panel, we hope to contribute to a more thorough understanding of the grammatical structures of French-based Creole languages while at the same time considering them as interacting with the conditions of communication in a given situation. In a broader sense, this panel is also meant to increase the visibility of French-based Creole languages in mainland France.