Article Title：A look at the acts of identity theory through a social network analysis of Portuguese-based Creoles in West Africa
Abstract：
This paper examines a hypothesis in the Acts of Identity theory that suggests a complementary relationship between the variant attributes of an individual's linguistic presentation and the individual's social identity. Through the mathematical modeling of social network analysis, the paper examines 169 lexical relationships between 20 speakers of Portuguese-based Creoles in West Africa. The resulting sociometric graphs, at the lexical and phonetic levels, find six network clusters in the data. The research also finds complementary relationships between these six network clusters and other social grouping features. The paper thus concludes with the objective mathematical modeling of social network analysis substantiating the notion of a complementary relationship between the variant attributes of an individual's linguistic presentation and the individual's social identity. The conclusion finds that the phonetic level may carry most of the load in marking social identity, and that the lexical level may carry a lighter load is this area. The conclusion thus finds that the lexicon may be a rather weak feature in the function of marking social identity and therefore flexible and open to lexical enrichment, adlexification (or relexification?), as the stronger identity marking features of the phonetic level can be overlaid on the lexical additions. The conclusion also suggests that the social structure of the post-creole continuum may be one of social fractures and clusters, like any other language, rather than one analogous with a linear continuum of lects.
Keywords: linguistic acts of identity; social network analysis; Portuguese-based Creoles of West Africa; mathematical analysis and modeling of linguistic variation; sociolexical identity; sociophonetic identity; relexification; post-creole continuum
DOI: 10.1075/jpcl.16.1.02gra
Source：JOURNAL OF PIDGIN AND CREOLE LANGUAGES
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