The history of kedé in Sudanese Arabic and Arabic-based pidgins and creoles. From speaker-oriented modal marker to general subordinator.

International audienceThis paper deals with the issue of the relation between modality and clausal subordination and how this relation can be revealed by synchronic data from different languages (Nordström 2010). In more detail, the paper provides a semantic analysis of the modal marker kedé in Sudanese Arabic (Trimingham 1946) and in the Arabic-based creoles of East Africa (i.e. Juba Arabic, Miller and Manfredi forth; Ki-Nubi of Bombo, Wellens 2005; Ki-Nubi of Mombasa, Luffin 2005). By describing the synchronic meanings of kedé, the study argues that this marker expresses a set of related modal functions developed along the lines of the grammaticalization path speaker-oriented modality > subordinate modality (Bybee et al. 1994). Against this background, it is noteworthy that the use of kedé as clausal subordinator represents an innovative development of Arabic-based creoles in which it introduces different types of subordinate clauses, in possible combination with other subordinators inherited from Sudanese Arabic. The question cantherefore be raised as to which semantic category underlies the increase of the functional scope of kedé in Arabic-based creoles and as to whether creolization resulted in a complication of the clausal subordination of the lexifier language