Rhythm and syllable weight in the prosodic words of the Gulf of Guinea Proto-Creole

Abstract

The contact between Portuguese speakers and slaved multilingual African populations on São Tome island, West Africa, started at the end of XV century, made a new language emerge: The Proto-Creole of Gulf of Guinea (PGG). After a while, the PGG branched into Santome, Lung’Ie, Angolar and Fa d’Ambô. Starting with the hypothesis that lexicon formation of PGG would have prosodic motivation, we investigate if factors such as uniformity and symmetry towards rhythm associated to syllable weight (GHINI, 1993) would be engaged in the formation of a minimal prosodic word (VIGÁRIO, 2003). Considering how some phonological processes might be productive regarding to lexicon configuration in PGG (according to number of syllables), we give special attention to vowel agglutination (o pé (Portuguese) → *ɔpɛ “foot”). Such linguistic process consists in the interpretation of a definite article from Portuguese as part of the stem that follows, resulting in a new prosodic word with two or three syllables. However, our results show that phonological and prosodic system of PGG accepted the formation of words with more syllables as much as with less syllables than there was in Portuguese that took part in PGG formation. Thus, the initial hypothesis doesn’t sustain itself: vowel agglutination, for instance, occurred in very few PGG words, showing itself as a hardly occurring process. Nevertheless, there seems to be a restriction about verbs starting with vowels, dialoging with another restriction found in Edoid languages (also involved in PGG formation) which states nouns must start with a vowel segment.