RECONSTRUCTING KRIOL SYLLABLE STRUCTURES*

(Universidade de Brasíla) The Portuguese pidgin/creole (PPC) formed along the African coast in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries is of paramount importance for the history of creolistics. For instance, it is intimately linked to the monogenetic theory presented by some creolists to explain the origin of several creoles around the world. However, this importance has not been refl ected in the number of studies devoted to PPC. The English and French-based creoles are much better studied, both structurally and historically. To my knowledge, the fi rst time the word “crioulo ” was even used in reference to a PPC was in 16841. The fi rst creole phrase was recorded as late as 1696, in a ra-ther Lusocentric way. But we had to wait until the end of the 19th century to see texts written in this creole2. As in the case of the phrase just mentioned, they were written in a Lusitanized way. The only documents we have from the 15th to the 19th centuries are some isolated words whose morphological – not to mention syntactic behavior- is entirely unknown. Due to this lack op records in the form of texts and complex words (compoun