Comparison of minority and equality in Casamance Creole La comparaison d'infériorité et d'égalité en créole de Casamance En Fr

Résumé En

Comparative constructions have been the subject of several studies that led to typological models (see Stassen (1985 and 2005), Cuzzolin & Lehmann (2004), Haspelmath and al. (2017)). Nevertheless, these models don't take into account Creole languages. In Casamance Creole, apart from Nunez (forthcoming), studies on comparison were not well detailed (see Doneux & Rougé (1988), Biagui (2012 and 2018) Biagui & Quint (2013)). These studies have focused much on comparison of majority, giving less importance to comparison of minority. The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed description of different ways and means to express comparisons of minority and equality in Casamance Creole. While comparison of equality is generally expressed in Casamance Creole by suma (like) which comes from Portuguese assim + coma (thus + as), there are no specific morphological morpheme to express comparison of minority. Preliminary results of this study show that, to overcome this lack, Casamance Creole uses several strategies. The comparison of minority is basically expressed from a comparison of majority sentence by combining the verbal negation marker ka with the degree marker má. This study provides, on the one hand, a detailed description of Casamance Creole minority and equality comparison strategies. On the other hand, this study constitutes a contribution to typological studies on comparisons specially minority and equality via an Afro-Portuguese Creole language.