Les constructions possessives des créoles portugais : le contraste Est-Ouest et les contacts luso-néerlandais

Portuguese creoles are divided between a Western and an Eastern area. The former includes all the languages spoken along and off the West African coast, as well as Spanish-relexified Papiamentu in the Caribbean. The Eastern area comprises Indo-Portuguese and its offshoots (Batavia Creole, Papiá Kristang, and Macaense). Both areas contrast on a number of features, in particular as far as the structure of possessive constructions is concerned. A typical Western instance of such a construction is Guinea-Bissau Kriyol kasa di Jon {house of J.} ‘John’s house’, (Kihm 1994), whereas a typical Eastern example is Korlai Teru su kadz {T. SU house} ‘Teru’s house’ (Clements 2007). The former construction is not represented in the East, except in Diu Indo-Portuguese (Cardoso 2013), whereas the latter is absent in the West, except in Papiamentu as an alternative to the {NP 1 di NP 2 } construction. The contrast raises at least two questions: What is the proper morphosyntactic analysis of these constructions, especially the Eastern one? Why did the Eastern Portuguese creoles retain a construction that has no obvious source in the lexifier instead of keeping the original lexifier construction as the Western group did? The paper is organized according to these two questions. First I give a formal definition of the expression ‘possessive constructions’ and review how they are realized in creole languages generally. Then I focus on Portuguese creoles, describe possessive constructions in the two areas, and propose a morphosyntactic analysis. I then formulate an explanatory hypothesis for the East-West contrast, try to support it with linguistic and historical arguments, and examine possible counter-evidence. Finally I assess what such an explanation entails for how we conceive of creole emergence.