Rebecca Arkell

RTG PhD student, member since 2024

Project “Language in Context: A Sociohistorical Analysis of Morphosyntactic Change in Cabo Verdean Creole”

The study of Creoles presents unique challenges due to their significant variation and dynamic nature, allowing us to observe language change in real time. Creoles often emerge from complex multilingual settings and are deeply intertwined with their societal contexts, which comes with the methodological challenge to identify socio-cultural determinants of change and to test hypotheses about diachronic processes (Rickford and Romaine 1999, eds.; Thomason 2008). My project addresses these challenges by examining form-meaning mismatches in Cabo Verdean Creole (CVC), the oldest living Creole language spoken in the Cabo Verdean archipelago. Like other Creoles, CVC displays unpredictable inflectional meanings and non-one-to-one correspondences between form and meaning. A notable example is the marker ta, traced back to the Portuguese/Spanish verb estar. In CVC, ta serves multiple functions, including realis, irrealis, habitual, imperfective, and passive, and may even be a vacuous inflectional element in some CVC varieties (Baptista 2002: 77-80). My project focuses on understanding the determinants of variation in the societal context and through a historical perspective. It draws inferences from real-time (historical data) as well as apparent-time (speech production of contemporary speakers of different age groups) scaled data. This PhD project is expected to provide insights into how morphosyntactic categories have evolved over time and their impact on meaning and to contribute to the ongoing debate on Creole Exceptionalism. An important dimension is the focus on the sociocultural factors, enhancing our understanding of how linguistic variation intersects with social and cultural dynamics in Cabo Verdean society.

Background and research interests:

With a keen interest in African linguistics, language in use, language ecology, language variation, and Creole languages, I am driven to investigate the complex interplay between morphosyntactic structures and context-based meaning in Cabo Verdean Creole. My research aims to contribute to our understanding of how language evolves and interacts with social, cultural, and historical factors. I hold a Research Master's degree in Linguistics from Leiden University where I graduated cum laude with a thesis on the discursive construction of migrant representation in Italian newspapers. Previously, I obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Language Translation and Interpreting from Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici in Pisa where I focused my thesis on the linguistic vitality of the Valdôtain patois and the sociolinguistic situation in the Aosta Valley. My educational background has equipped me with the necessary skills to delve deeper into the linguistic complexities of the Cabo Verdean context.