Existence, location, possession, and copula in Malabar Indo-Portuguese

Ana Krajinović

doi:10.1515/jsall-2019-2007

Article

Existence, location, possession, and copula in Malabar Indo-Portuguese

Ana Krajinović

Published/Copyright: November 19, 2019

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From the journal Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics Volume 6 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper offers a diachronic and a contact-based analysis of existential, locative, possessive, and copulative constructions in Malabar Indo-Portuguese creole (MIP). The existential, locative, and possessive predicates are all expressed with the copulative verb tæ, and nominal and property-denoting predicates can either have the copula tæ or zero copula. I analyze these copulative constructions by establishing their sources in the Portuguese lexifier and Malayalam substrate/adstrate. I show that although the Portuguese verbs ter ‘have’ and estar ‘be’ have paved the way to the semantics of tæ, Malayalam had a strong impact on the morphosyntax and semantics of existential, locative, possessive, and copulative constructions in MIP. This influence is most notable in the case of possessives, which take dative subjects. These findings are compared to the relevant structures in other South Asian languages and show that the existence of locative possession is a strong areal feature of South Asia. I also show that the variability of copula usage in nominal and property-denoting predicates can be explained by variable input from Portuguese and Malayalam copulative constructions. One of the most salient features influenced by Malayalam is the choice of what are etymologically Portuguese nouns instead of adjectives in property-denoting predicates.

Keywords: copula; existence; location; possession; Malabar Indo-Portuguese; creole

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Hugo Cardoso for sharing an unpublished version of the Malabar Indo-Portuguese corpus. I also wish to thank to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and to the audience of Between EXISTENCE and LOCATION Workshop in 2016 at Universität Tübingen for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Since some parts of this work have been published in my book (Krajinović 2018), I thank Lincom for allowing the reproduction of this material. This work has been funded by the following projects: the MelaTAMP project (number 273640553) funded the German Research Foundation (DGF), Project IF/01009/2012 funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal), and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Australia).

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Published Online: 2019-11-19

Published in Print: 2019-11-26

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jsall-2019-2007

Keywords for this article

copula; existence; location; possession; Malabar Indo-Portuguese; creole