Creole Languages have emerged during the 18th and 19th century in French and English slave colonies in the Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean. This talk presents proposals for the formal modelling of a small group of French-based Creole Languages of the Atlantic-Caribbean area. Those languages have a vocabulary which is mainly based on French words, but an original syntactic system, more similar to isolating languages, which results from strong and fast restructuring processes. The unification-based FS-TAG (Feature Structures – Tree Adjoining Grammars) formalism has proven to be a very useful frame to model the linguistic features of Creole languages. This work has led us to tackle two questions which we believe have an interest for formal linguistics, as they might be generalized to other linguistic settings: (1) how to factor a core language model that may be reused in the modelling of many related languages; (2) how to relax the part-of-speech category constraint, in languages where the borders between parts of speech are neither rigid nor stable (a noted fact about isolating languages).
A short bio: Pascal Vaillant is a senior lecturer in computational linguistics, currently working at Université Paris 13 (France). He also formerly worked at the Université des Antilles (in Martinique) and in French Guiana. He has experience in studying contexts of dialectal variation and language contact.
