Metalinguistic knowledge of pragmatic markers in Kwéyòl Donmnik and English

Through interviews with bilingual users of Kwéyòl Donmnik (Dominica Creole), an understudied and endangered French lexifier Creole, and a questionnaire for users of English, a colonial language that has been in intense contact with Kwéyòl for over 200 years, this study investigates the metalinguistic knowledge members of each language community have about a selection of pragmatic markers that are cross-linguistically similar: Kwéyòl konsa 'so', èben 'well', and papa/Bondyé 'father/God' and English so, well, and oh my God. The study also examines Kwéyòl users' understandings of la 'there', a locative pragmatic marker. Participants' responses paralleled and expanded upon linguists' observations, and while there were commonalities between the two groups' self-reports, Kwéyòl users attributed greater cultural and communicative value to their markers. This research expands the limited body of work on Kwéyòl and reinforces that pragmatic markers are both procedurally meaningful and culturally embedded. It also demonstrates that, while corpus-based approaches are fruitful, richer insights can be gained by also incorporating language users' lived expertise through direct elicitation of their metalinguistic knowledge about how pragmatic markers are employed and perceived.