La suffixation en –asyon et en –é du créole guadeloupéen : deux cas de réanalyse de schémas morphologiques du français

Abstract

This paper is about the creation of two suffixations in Guadeloupean Creole, the –asyon suffixation (konpòrtasyon ‘negative behavior’ ← konpòrté ‘to behave’; pwofitasyon ‘profit’ ← pwofité ‘to enjoy’) and the –é suffixation (bwanné ‘to move’ ← bwann ‘movement’; miganné ‘to mix’ ← migan ‘purée’). Guadeloupean Creole has seldom been studied from the point of view of morphology. It is considered as a full-fledged language in which 90% of the vocabulary is inherited from its superstratum or lexifier language (French). The vocabulary is inherited with some morphological schemas which become productive in Creole to form new lexemes, either on French or non-French bases. Yet, morphological schemas are not fully inherited: at the very least, they are accompanied by phonological, semantic or syntactic changes with respect to the original schema. The two Creole morphological suffixations on which this paper focus are partially inherited from French. We argue that these suffixations follow from reanalysis mechanisms of morphological schemas already known from work on morphological change, rather than from a process of grammaticalization.a) –asyon suffixation which phonologically extends the French –ion suffix by incorporating a root element; b) –é suffixation which consists of a “deinflectionalization” of the infinitive verbal suffix that becomes a derivational suffix.Our study is based on a corpus collected by a native speaker, from dictionaries and field surveys of native speakers. It is composed of 7045 lexemes of Guadeloupe Creole from all the islands. The analysis was conducted within the theoretical framework of lexematic morphology. Finally, our study allows us to take a position in the debate on the morphology of Creole languages, (i) against the claim that derivation emerges only through gradual grammaticalization and (ii) against the hypothesis of a poorer and simpler morphology of Creoles.