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Limonese Creole

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Limonese Creole (also called Limonese , Limón Creole English or Mekatelyu ) is a dialect of Jamaican Patois (Jamaican Creole), an English-based creole language, spoken in Limón Province on the Caribbean Sea coast of Costa Rica . The number of native speakers is unknown, but 1986 estimates suggests that there are fewer than 60,000 native and second language speakers combined.

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34-520: Limonese is very similar structurally and lexically to the Jamaican Creole spoken in Jamaica and Panama and to a lesser extent other English-based creoles of the region, such as Colón Creole , Mískito Coastal Creole , Belizean Kriol , and San Andrés and Providencia Creole ; many of these are also somewhat mutually intelligible to Limonese and each other. The name Mekatelyu is a transliteration of

68-401: A lemma ( pl. : lemmas or lemmata ) is the canonical form , dictionary form , or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, break , breaks , broke , broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme , with break as the lemma by which they are indexed. Lexeme , in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of

102-432: A catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock); and a grammar , a system of rules which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also thought to include bound morphemes , which cannot stand alone as words (such as most affixes ). In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions, collocations and other phrasemes are also considered to be part of

136-480: A common vernacular used among Limonese speakers in informal contexts. Some linguists are undecided on the categorization of Limonese. According to some authors, Limonese should be treated as a separate language altogether while others contend that it is merely a part of a dialect continuum between English and Jamaican Patois . Limonese is documented to have been and is being gradually decreolized . Lexicon A lexicon (plural: lexicons , rarely lexica )

170-478: A dictionary, the lemma "go" represents the inflected forms "go", "goes", "going", "went", and "gone". The relationship between an inflected form and its lemma is usually denoted by an angle bracket, e.g., "went" < "go". Of course, the disadvantage of such simplifications is the inability to look up a declined or conjugated form of the word, but some dictionaries, like Webster's Dictionary , list "went". Multilingual dictionaries vary in how they deal with this issue:

204-557: A form of the indefinite pronoun one : do one's best , perjure oneself . In European languages with grammatical gender , the citation form of regular adjectives and nouns is usually the masculine singular. If the language also has cases , the citation form is often the masculine singular nominative. For many languages, the citation form of a verb is the infinitive : French aller , German gehen , Hindustani जाना / جانا , Spanish ir . English verbs usually have an infinitive, which in its bare form (without

238-412: A language's lexicon. Neologisms are often introduced by children who produce erroneous forms by mistake. Other common sources are slang and advertising. There are two types of borrowings (neologisms based on external sources) that retain the sound of the source language material: The following are examples of external lexical expansion using the source language lexical item as the basic material for

272-437: A language's rules. For example, the suffix "-able" is usually only added to transitive verbs , as in "readable" but not "cryable". A compound word is a lexeme composed of several established lexemes, whose semantics is not the sum of that of their constituents. They can be interpreted through analogy , common sense and, most commonly, context . Compound words can have simple or complex morphological structures. Usually, only

306-706: A lexicon, they consider such things as what constitutes a word; the word/ concept relationship; lexical access and lexical access failure; how a word's phonology , syntax , and meaning intersect; the morphology -word relationship; vocabulary structure within a given language; language use ( pragmatics ); language acquisition ; the history and evolution of words ( etymology ); and the relationships between words, often studied within philosophy of language . Various models of how lexicons are organized and how words are retrieved have been proposed in psycholinguistics , neurolinguistics and computational linguistics . Citation form In morphology and lexicography ,

340-424: A minimal description. To describe the size of a lexicon, lexemes are grouped into lemmas. A lemma is a group of lexemes generated by inflectional morphology . Lemmas are represented in dictionaries by headwords that list the citation forms and any irregular forms , since these must be learned to use the words correctly. Lexemes derived from a word by derivational morphology are considered new lemmas. The lexicon

374-499: A sentence because of initial mutations . The noun cainteoir , the lemma for the noun meaning "speaker", has a variety of forms: chainteoir , gcainteoir , cainteora , chainteora , cainteoirí , chainteoirí and gcainteoirí . Some phrases are cited in a sort of lemma: Carthago delenda est (literally, "Carthage must be destroyed") is a common way of citing Cato , but what he said was nearer to censeo Carthaginem esse delendam ("I hold Carthage to be in need of destruction"). In

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408-434: A single word, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic , Turkish , and Russian . The process of determining the lemma for a given lexeme is called lemmatisation . The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts , although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary. The form of

442-400: A word that is chosen to serve as the lemma is usually the least marked form, but there are several exceptions such as the use of the infinitive for verbs in some languages. For English, the citation form of a noun is the singular (and non-possessive) form: mouse rather than mice . For multiword lexemes that contain possessive adjectives or reflexive pronouns , the citation form uses

476-431: Is also organized according to open and closed categories. Closed categories , such as determiners or pronouns , are rarely given new lexemes; their function is primarily syntactic . Open categories, such as nouns and verbs , have highly active generation mechanisms and their lexemes are more semantic in nature. A central role of the lexicon is documenting established lexical norms and conventions . Lexicalization

510-579: Is generally used in the context of a single language. Therefore, multi-lingual speakers are generally thought to have multiple lexicons. Speakers of language variants ( Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese , for example) may be considered to possess a single lexicon. Thus a cash dispenser (British English) as well as an automatic teller machine or ATM in American English would be understood by both American and British speakers, despite each group using different dialects. When linguists study

544-416: Is the lemma under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appears. The headword is used to locate the entry, and dictates its alphabetical position. Depending on the size and nature of the dictionary or encyclopedia, the entry may include alternative meanings of the word, its etymology , pronunciation and inflections , related lemmas such as compound words or phrases that contain

578-406: Is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical ). In linguistics , a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes . The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν ( lexikon ), neuter of λεξικός ( lexikos ) meaning 'of or for words'. Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially

612-443: Is the most common of word formation strategies cross-linguistically. Comparative historical linguistics studies the evolution of languages and takes a diachronic view of the lexicon. The evolution of lexicons in different languages occurs through a parallel mechanism. Over time historical forces work to shape the lexicon, making it simpler to acquire and often creating an illusion of great regularity in language. The term "lexicon"

646-400: Is the part of the word that never changes even when morphologically inflected; a lemma is the least marked form of the word. In linguistic analysis, the stem is defined more generally as a form without any of its possible inflectional morphemes (but including derivational morphemes and may contain multiple roots). When phonology is taken into account, the definition of the unchangeable part of

680-564: Is the process by which new words, having gained widespread usage, enter the lexicon. Since lexicalization may modify lexemes phonologically and morphologically, it is possible that a single etymological source may be inserted into a single lexicon in two or more forms. These pairs, called a doublet , are often close semantically. Two examples are aptitude versus attitude and employ versus imply . The mechanisms, not mutually exclusive, are: Neologisms are new lexeme candidates which, if they gain wide usage over time, become part of

714-517: Is traditionally used, but some modern dictionaries use the infinitive instead (except for Bulgarian, which lacks infinitives; for contracted verbs in Ancient Greek, an uncontracted first person singular present tense is used to reveal the contract vowel: φιλέω philéō for φιλῶ philō "I love" [implying affection], ἀγαπάω agapáō for ἀγαπῶ agapō "I love" [implying regard]). Finnish dictionaries list verbs not under their root, but under

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748-524: The Langenscheidt dictionary of German does not list ging (< gehen ), but the Cassell does. Lemmas or word stems are used often in corpus linguistics for determining word frequency. In that usage, the specific definition of "lemma" is flexible depending on the task it is being used for. A word may have different pronunciations , depending on its phonetic environment (the neighbouring sounds) or on

782-479: The degree of stress in a sentence. An example of the latter is the weak and strong forms of certain English function words like some and but (pronounced /sʌm/ , /bʌt/ when stressed but /s(ə)m/ , /bət/ when unstressed). Dictionaries usually give the pronunciation used when the word is pronounced alone (its isolation form ) and with stress, but they may also note common weak forms of pronunciation. The stem

816-429: The first infinitive, marked with -(t)a , -(t)ä . For Japanese , the non-past (present and future) tense is used. For Arabic the third-person singular masculine of the past/perfect tense is the least-marked form and is used for entries in modern dictionaries. In older dictionaries, which are still commonly used, the triliteral of the word, either a verb or a noun, is used. This is similar to Hebrew , which also uses

850-406: The head requires inflection for agreement. Compounding may result in lexemes of unwieldy proportion. This is compensated by mechanisms that reduce the length of words. A similar phenomenon has been recently shown to feature in social media also where hashtags compound to form longer-sized hashtags that are at times more popular than the individual constituent hashtags forming the compound. Compounding

884-469: The headword, and encyclopedic information about the concepts represented by the word. For example, the headword bread may contain the following (simplified) definitions: The Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian contains around 500,000 headwords. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has around 273,000 headwords along with 220,000 other lemmas, while Webster's Third New International Dictionary has about 470,000. The Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB),

918-551: The largest lexicon of the German language , has around 330,000 headwords. These values are cited by the dictionary makers and may not use exactly the same definition of a headword. In addition, headwords may not accurately reflect a dictionary's physical size. The OED and the DWB , for instance, include exhaustive historical reviews and exact citations from source documents not usually found in standard dictionaries. The term 'lemma' comes from

952-413: The lexicon. Dictionaries are lists of the lexicon, in alphabetical order, of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included. Items in the lexicon are called lexemes, lexical items, or word forms. Lexemes are not atomic elements but contain both phonological and morphological components. When describing the lexicon, a reductionist approach is used, trying to remain general while using

986-454: The neologization, listed in decreasing order of phonetic resemblance to the original lexical item (in the source language): The following are examples of simultaneous external and internal lexical expansion using target language lexical items as the basic material for the neologization but still resembling the sound of the lexical item in the source language: Another mechanism involves generative devices that combine morphemes according to

1020-433: The particle to ) is its least marked (for example, break is chosen over to break , breaks , broke , breaking , and broken ); for defective verbs with no infinitive the present tense is used (for example, must has only one form while shall has no infinitive, and both lemmas are their lexemes' present tense forms). For Latin , Ancient Greek , Modern Greek , and Bulgarian , the first person singular present tense

1054-428: The phrase "make I tell you", or in standard English "let me tell you". In Costa Rica, one common way to refer to Limonese is by the term " patois ", a word of French origin used to refer to provincial Gallo-Romance languages of France that were historically considered to be unsophisticated "broken French"; these include Provençal , Occitan and Norman among many others. Limonese developed from Jamaican Creole that

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1088-439: The third-person singular masculine perfect form, e.g. ברא bara' create, כפר kaphar deny. Georgian uses the verbal noun . For Korean , -da is attached to the stem. In Tamil , an agglutinative language , the verb stem (which is also the imperative form - the least marked one) is often cited, e.g., இரு In Irish , words are highly inflected by case (genitive, nominative, dative and vocative) and by their place within

1122-429: The word is not useful, as can be seen in the phonological forms of the words in the preceding example: "produced" / p r ə ˈ dj uː s t / vs. "production" / p r ə ˈ d ʌ k ʃ ən / . Some lexemes have several stems but one lemma. For instance the verb " to go " has the stems "go" and "went" due to suppletion : the past tense was co-opted from a different verb, " to wend ". A headword or catchword

1156-975: Was introduced to the Limón Province by Jamaican migrant workers who arrived to work on the construction of the Atlantic railway , the banana plantations and on the Pacific railway. During the Atlantic slave trade , British colonizers in Jamaica and elsewhere in the British West Indies delivered African slaves from various regions of Africa who did not speak a common language so various creoles developed to facilitate communication between them, largely influenced by slavers' English. Early forms of Limonese had to adjust for context that they were being used in so two language registers developed, one mutually intelligible to and heavily influenced by English for formal contexts and

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