Echoes of Africa

This paper considers whether specific reduplication processes in the English-lexified Creole languages of Jamaica and Suriname are due to substrate transfer by exploring the extent to which their formal, functional and selectional characteristics in those languages can be related to Niger-Congo (NC). The issue is discussed in the context of a theory of markedness and we propose that formal and semantic iconicity are among the criteria for evaluating markedness in reduplication. According to markedness criteria, we identify deverbal noun reduplication and deverbal attribute formation, as they occur in Jamaican and the Suriname Creoles, and Jamaican X-like reduplication, as marked processes. Assuming that marked processes provide better evidence for substrate transfer, we searched for parallels for these specific processes in likely NC source languages. The best evidence for substrate transfer is found in stative adjective reduplication in the Suriname Creole languages, which finds a parallel in Gbe. The evidence for transfer from Gbe in the deverbal adjectives of Jamaican is less convincing, but merits consideration. Deverbal nominalizations of the Suriname Creoles and Jamaican echo an Igbo source that needs to be investigated, notably with respect to Jamaican. As for X-like reduplication, we found no convincing argument to attribute it to substrate transfer from any likely NC source.