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This article addresses the historical and sociolinguistic evolution of Fa d'Ambô, a Portuguese-related creole language spoken originally on the small island of Annobón in Equatorial Guinea. It will be shown that Fa d'Ambô and the three creole languages spoken on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (Santome, Angolar and Principense) descend from a single contact language that arose on the island of São Tomé and branched in the sixteenth century. After its permanent settlement in the second half of the sixteenth century, Annobón became strongly isolated until the twentieth century. Due to intense migration from Annobón to Equatorial Guinea's multilingual capital Malabo over the last decades, Fa d'Ambô's speech community has not only become divided but also more exposed to other languages, in particular to English-based creole Pichi, the capital's lingua franca. Given the small size of the Fa d'Ambô speech community (approx. 5,000 speakers), it will be argued that these factors, in addition to the lack of government support for the country's minority languages, pose an increasing threat to the survival of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present extended argumentation against a raising analysis for every type of relative clauses. Specifically, we argue that purpose relative clauses involve raising of a null operator to Spec,CP, contrary to that-relatives, which involve raising of the antecedent DP. We further argue that this analysis applies to all purpose relative clauses, both subject and object purpose relatives. After showing that all purpose relatives in European Portuguese are CPs, we present several arguments in favor of a null operator analysis of this type of structure. First, we show that parasitic gap effects support the existence of a variable in object purpose relatives and in VP adjunct purpose clauses with an object gap. We then show that Principle A effects in object purpose relatives allow to distinguish this type of relatives from that-relatives and support a null operator analysis of the former. The same analysis is shown to apply to subject purpose relatives. Second, we compare European Portuguese to Capeverdean, a Portuguese-related creole. We claim that the properties of purpose relative clauses in Capeverdean show that the derivation of such clauses is different from the derivation of that-relatives, although wh-movement applies in both. Finally, we suggest that an analysis distinguishing the structure of object purpose relatives from the one of object that-relatives may contribute to explain some acquisition facts: if purpose relatives involve movement of a null operator instead of movement of a DP, they do not give rise to intervention effects that violate the version of Relativized Minimality which Friedmann et al. (2009) argue children assume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders the complementiser and the tense-mood-aspect systems of the Papiamentu clause within the framework of the split CP (Rizzi 1997) and the split INFL (Pollock 1989) hypotheses, providing new evidence for the left periphery heads. It provides a detailed account of the Papiamentu morphemes involved that unifies syntactic and interpretive properties. Of particular interest is the proposal that di – which introduces infinitives – and lo – traditionally considered a future marker – both head FinP, and that pa, when functioning as a marker of necessity, heads MoodP. Contra certain claims in the literature, this paper argues that the order of preverbal material is not different from that of other Caribbean creoles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The substratum theory, while regarded as antiquated and oversimplified by some modern historical linguists, seems to be necessary to explain the influence of certain West African languages on the Creole Portuguese of Annobon. Features which match West African languages but no known variety of Portuguese include vowel harmony, the breaking or deletion of consonant clusters, the canonical syllable structure, palatalization of consonants, replacement of/r/ by/l/, absence of the passive transformation, the nature of negation, the copula, several aspects of word order, and several types of lexical item including videophones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The monogenetic theory of the origin of European-based pidgins and Creoles rests upon a thesis which carries the chain of development back to Sabir, the Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, in the Middle Ages and later. The most important link was Pidgin Portuguese, whose speakers were the most important in the early slave trade and in general European maritime expansion. Italian -- especially Genoese -- merchants and seamen, the earliest users of Sabir, were in especially close contact with Portuguese merchants and sailors throughout the fifteenth century. The multilingual situation and the compact socio-economic unit constituted by whites on the Atlantic coast of Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provide an explanation of the transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]