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 {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.