L’impact du futur périphrastique français dans les franco-créoles

Abstract

Creole languages are the most recent natural languages (Khim 2005). As a matter of fact the question of their classification imposed itself very early to linguists when the language science enquired about the topic of language filiation in the second half of 19th Century. In the same century, some linguists qualified these languages as “mixed”. Mixed like the population that used to speak them. Others in the 20th century (Thomason & Kaufman 1988) described them as a category of language with no genesis for they were like linguistic monsters. Indeed not resembling one’s parents is a kind of monstrosity, Aristotle says. This article deals with historical comparative research. It aims at bringing a contribution to the establishment of relatedness between three French-based Creoles (Haitian, Antillean (Guadeloupe/Martinique) Louisianan and the varieties of colonial French. The colonial French documents are from St. Barthelemy, Missouri, Frenchville, Francophone Louisiana and Quebec. The predicative syntagm of the three Creoles are compared on the one hand and on the other hand a comparison is established with the varieties of colonial French. The corpus is composed of two kinds of texts: the texts showing the early stage of the Creole languages and the documents showing the language state of Colonial French. The research mainly tackles the TMA system and deals with the impact of French periphrastic future in the development of French based Creoles. In specialized literature, the filiation of Creole languages is subject to debate. Because of their status of contact language they are usually designated as non-normal (Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Dyen, Kruskal & Black 1992). Other scholars consider their birth as non-exceptional (Degraff 2003, Mufwene 2007). Among the items mentioned to classify Creole languages as non-normal languages, we find the TMA markers. They are perceived as one of the most divergent items from the European language because of their present form and analytical functioning. However, as we will try to show it, the expression of future in French based Creoles has undoubtedly a French origin. This origin is confirmed through the study of the forms, the meaning and the syntactic functioning. Thanks to the study of a corpus of texts presenting colonial varieties of French, but also ancient texts in Haitian, Antillean, and Louisiana Creoles dated respectively from 1671 to 1850 and 1867 we intend to show the impact of colonial varieties of French in the development of French based Creoles. We proceed as follows: first, we intend to understand how and why periphrastic future was preferred by the French settlers. Then we introduce the results of the analyses of both Colonial French and Creole corpus. At last we put forward the corresponding patterns between the two groups of languages.

Keywords

• colonial French
• Creole
• Haiti
• Antillies
• Louisiana
• Historical Comparative