Les prépositions en Créole Casamançais

Abstract

Prepositions in Casamance Creole
 If nouns, verbs, and adjectives can manifest indications of person, plurality, or negation, and recognize that adverbs, at the very least, may bear the mark of negation, a distinct category of words emerges that is impervious to both inflection and derivation. This specific class, known in traditional and ancient grammar as prepositions, falls within the broader category of relators or connectors. These elements serve to distinctly mark syntactic relationships in statements by delineating the nature of the relationship between a determiner and a determined. The study of prepositions, in general, has been the focus of several investigations resulting in typological models often excluding data from Creoles, with Casamance Creole being a notable example. Born from interactions between Portuguese and African languages during the 16th to 19th centuries, Casamance Creole forms a linguistic group with the Portuguese Creole of Guinea Bissau, sharing a significant portion of its history until 1886 when Casamance was ceded. Historically, Creole served as the primary lingua franca in the city of Ziguinchor and adjacent areas from at least the 17th century until the years following Senegal's independence. Subsequently, it has continued to thrive as a first language in specific districts of Ziguinchor (Santhiaba, Boudodi, etc.) and surrounding villages (Adéane, Sindone, etc.). Approximately 20,000 speakers, mainly from Christian communities such as Bainounk, Mandjak, and Mancagne, use Creole as their first or second language in Casamance. Additionally, the language is spoken in other regions of Senegal and among the Casamance diaspora abroad. From a typological perspective, Casamance Creole exhibits characteristics often cited to describe it as a language belonging neither to the Atlantic group nor to the Mandé family. This article not only presents a detailed description of prepositions in Casamance Creole from morphological, syntactic, and semantic viewpoints but also contributes valuable insights to the typology of isolating languages. Isolating languages, as opposed to inflectional languages (agglutinating, synthetic) and polysynthetic languages, open up particularly intriguing lines of thought.