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International audience; Cette contribution a pour objet, à partir de sept textes de Hugo Schuchardt composés entre 1882 et 1889, de placer l'émergence des créoles dans une perspective qu'on appellerait aujourd'hui la « dynamique » des langues : pour Schuchardt, l'évolution des langues est déterminée par des facteurs externes, dont les contacts de langues, ce qui place ce chercheur en opposition avec le courant néogrammairien dominant de son époque. Le regard privilégie une lecture qualitative, orientée sur certains détails caractéristiques, sans se priver d'une remise en perspective des travaux de Schuchardt dans la production scientifique de son temps. Après une brève explicitation du statut que l'auteur accorde au « Negerportugiesisch » (NP), je présenterai les caractéristiques de ces textes, en ce qui concerne leurs sources, leur macrostructure et les données d'étude convoquées. Je présenterai ensuite la classification des NP proposée par l'auteur pour enfin problématiser la mise en frontière opérée par la différenciation de ces entités linguistiques dans les textes, dont l'intérêt majeur consiste à mettre en évidence une réalité mouvante et la « parenté essentielle » entre les langues humaines. Abstract This contribution aims at putting out the emergence of creole languages in Hugo Schuchardt's perspective. The reading of seven papers by the author about " Negerportugiesisch " (negro-Portuguese or black Portuguese) written between 1882 and 1889, suggests that his angle is very close to what we would call nowadays dynamics of language. Assuming that language change or evolution is due to external factors such as language contact, Schuchardt's point of view strongly disagrees with the then mainstream theory of the Neogrammarians. The first section outlines the status of this object of investigation within the author's works. The sections 2 and 3 present the general structure of the texts, their sources and the corpus data analyzed. Section 4 gives a presentation of Schuchardt's classification of the different varieties of Negerportugiesisch; the problem of delimitation of linguistic entities leads us to a final central — but less apparent — topic in the author's perspective : " elementary kinship " of human languages.

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 {NP1 di NP2} 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.