The Handbook ofPidgin and Creole Studies

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The Handbookof Pidgin andCreole Studies

Edited by

Silvia Kouwenberg andJohn Victor Singler

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2008© 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2008 SilviaKouwenberg and John Victor Singler

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataThe handbook of Pidgin and Creole studies / edited by Silvia Kouwenberg & John VictorSingler.

p. cm. — (Blackwell handbooks in linguistics)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-631-22902-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Pidgin languages. 2. Creole dialects.

I. Kouwenberg, Silvia, 1960– II. Singler, John Victor.

PM7802.H36 2008417′.22—dc22

2008010423

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Set in 10/12 point Palatino by Graphicraft Limited, Hong KongPrinted in Singapore by Fabulous Printers Pte Ltd

1 2008

Contents

Notes on Contributors viiList of Abbreviations xiv

1 Introduction 1Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

Part I Properties of Pidgins and Creoles 17

2 Atlantic Creole Syntax 19Donald Winford

3 Forging Pacific Pidgin and Creole Syntax: Substrate,Discourse, and Inherent Variability 48Miriam Meyerhoff

4 Pidgin and Creole Morphology 74Terry Crowley

5 Creole Phonology 98Norval S. H. Smith

6 Pidgins versus Creoles and Pidgincreoles 130Peter Bakker

7 Non-Indo-European Pidgins and Creoles 158Kees Versteegh

Part II Perspectives on Pidgin/Creole Genesis 187

8 Pidgins/Creoles, and Second Language Acquisition 189Jeff Siegel

9 Creole Genesis: The Impact of the Language BioprogramHypothesis 219Tonjes Veenstra

10 Pidgins/Creoles and Historical Linguistics 242Sarah G. Thomason

vi Contents

11 Pidgins/Creoles and Contact Languages: An Overview 263Rajend Mesthrie

12 Creole Studies and Multilingualism 287Pieter Muysken

13 A Demographic Perspective on Creole Formation 309Jacques Arends

14 The Sociohistorical Context of Creole Genesis 332John Victor Singler

15 The Cultural in Pidgin Genesis 359Christine Jourdan

Part III Pidgins/Creoles and Linguistic Explanation 383

16 Grammaticalization in Pidgins and Creoles 385Adrienne Bruyn

17 Creoles, Markedness, and Default Settings: An Appraisal 411Alain Kihm

18 Semantic Evidence in Pidgin and Creole Genesis 440George Huttar

19 Pidgins, Creoles, and Variation 461Peter L. Patrick

Part IV Pidgins/Creoles and Kindred Languages 489

20 The Case of Signed Languages in the Context of Pidgin andCreole Studies 491Judy Kegl

21 Pidgins/Creoles and African American English 512Arthur K. Spears

22 Spanish-Based Creoles in the Caribbean 543John M. Lipski

Part V Pidgins/Creoles in Society 565

23 Pidgins/Creoles and Discourse 567Geneviève Escure

24 Pidgins/Creoles and Education 593Dennis Craig

25 Language Planning in Pidgins and Creoles 615Hubert Devonish

26 Literary Representations of Creole Languages: Cross-LinguisticPerspectives from the Caribbean 637Hélène Buzelin and Lise Winer

Author Index 666Language Index 677Subject Index 682

Contributors

Jacques Arends At the time of his death in 2005, Jacques Arends lectured atthe University of Amsterdam. His main interests were the historical develop-ment of the Suriname creoles and the history and structure of Lingua Franca.His publications tracked syntactic change in Sranan, explored the demographiccontext of creole genesis in Suriname (e.g., The Early Stages of Creolization,Benjamins, 1995), and made early texts available to the community (e.g., EarlySuriname Creole Documents, with Matthias Perl; Vervuert, 1994). He co-editedthe Atlas of the Languages of Suriname (with Eithne Carlin; KITLV, 2002). Anobituary and publication list appeared in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Lan-guages (by Adrienne Bruyn, 2007).

Peter Bakker gained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1992 andis a specialist in contact languages at Aarhus University, Denmark. He isespecially interested in pidgins and in mixed and intertwined languagessuch as Michif, and languages that underwent significant contact-inducedchange such as Romani. Some publications which demonstrate this interestare A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-FrenchLanguage of the Canadian Métis (Oxford University Press, 1997), The MixedLanguage Debate (co-edited with Yaron Matras; Mouton De Gruyter, 2003), andBibliography of Modern Romani Linguistics (with Yaron Matras; Benjamins 2003).linpb@hum.au.dk

Adrienne Bruyn currently participates in a project on the impact of contacton standard Dutch as it emerged between 1400 and 1700 (Radboud University,Nijmegen). She is also involved in the Suriname Creole Archive (SUCA),digitalizing eighteenth-century Sranan and Saramaccan materials. Her researchon creoles focuses on historical developments (e.g., Grammaticalization inCreoles: The Development of Determiners and Relative Clauses in Sranan, IFOTT,1995; St Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles: The Texts of Samuel Augustus Mathews inPerspective, University of Westminster Press, 1999, co-edited with Philip Baker).

viii Contributors

She was president of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in 2003–2004. a.bruyn@let.ru.nl

Hélène Buzelin teaches translation practice and theory at the Université deMontréal. She specializes in the sociology and ethnography of translation. Sheis the author of Sur le terrain de la traduction: parcours traductologique au coeur duroman de Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (Éditions du Gref, 2005), haspublished in literary and translation studies journals such as Canadian Litera-ture, JWIL, Target, Meta, TTR, The Translator, and contributed to a volume titledConstructing a Sociology of Translation (John Benjamins, 2007). She is also co-editor, with Deborah Folaron, of a special issue of Meta on Translation andNetwork Studies (2007). helene.buzelin@umontreal.ca

Dennis Craig The late Dennis Craig retired from his last academic position(Vice-Chancellor, University of Guyana) in 1995, after a career spanningseveral decades at the University of the West Indies (Mona), which had madehim Personal Professor of Language Education at that institution. He continuedto be of service to educators in the West Indies as co-editor of the Journalof Education and Development in the Caribbean and as director of his institute,Education & Research Associates Ltd., up to his death in 2004. A tribute toProfessor Craig and a partial list of his publications can be found at www.scl-online.net/drcraig.html.

Terry Crowley At the time of his death in January 2005, Terry Crowley wasProfessor in Linguistics at the University of Waikato (New Zealand), havingtaught linguistics previously at the University of the South Pacific and theUniversity of Papua New Guinea. His research interests and numerous pub-lications centered around anglophone Pacific pidgins and creoles, as well asOceanic languages. An obituary including an extensive biography and pub-lication list by John Lynch appeared in The Journal of Oceanic Linguistics 44,223–41 (2005).

Hubert Devonish is a Guyanese linguist who is Professor of Linguistics atthe University of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica). His research interests coverthe range from sociolinguistics and language variation, through language plan-ning and language education policy in creole language situations, to thedescription of Caribbean creole languages, particularly their phonological andsuprasegmental systems. Two works which demonstrate some of these inter-ests are Language and Liberation: Creole Language Politics in the Caribbean (KariaPress, 1986) and Talking Rhythm, Stressing Tone: Prominence in Anglo-West AfricanCreole Languages (Arawak Press, 2002). hubert.devonish@uwimona.edu.jm

Geneviève Escure is Professor of Linguistics in the English Department at theUniversity of Minnesota (Minneapolis, USA). Her areas of research includelanguage variation, language contact, gender and language, and endangered

Contributors ix

languages. She has worked extensively with the English-based creoles spokenin Belize and Honduras. She has also documented oral variation in Chinese.Her current work involves the documentation of Garifuna, a mixed languagenow endangered in Belize and Honduras. Her publications include Creole andDialect Continua: Standard Acquisition Processes in Belize and China (Benjamins,1997) and Creoles, Contact and Language Change: Linguistic and Social Implications(Benjamins, 2004). escur001@umn.edu

George Huttar began fieldwork in Suriname with Mary Huttar in 1968, focus-ing on Ndyuka. He has also conducted fieldwork on Aboriginal languages inAustralia, and has taught linguistics there and in the US and Kenya. Hisresearch interests include semantics and cognition as well as creoles, particu-larly those of Suriname. His publications include Ndyuka (with Mary Huttar;1994, Routledge) and a series of articles empirically investigating semanticorganization of experience as reflected in creole languages. He now serves asan editor for SIL International. george_huttar@sil.org

Christine Jourdan is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropo-logy at Concordia University in Montreal where she teaches anthropology andethnolinguistics. She has been doing fieldwork in the Solomon Islands since1981, focusing on Solomon Island Pidgin (e.g., Pijin: A Dictionary of the Pidginof the Solomon Islands, 2002: Parlons Pijin: Histoire sociolinguistics du pidgin desIles Salomon, 2007), on urbanization in the Pacific, and on theories of cultureand social change (e.g., Language, Culture, and Society, CUP, 2006, co-editedwith Kevin Tuite). She has also published in journals such as the Annual Re-view of Anthropology and Language in Society. jourdan@alcor.concordia.ca

Judy Kegl received her MA from Brown University and her PhD from MITand is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Signed Language ResearchLaboratory at the University of Southern Maine. She has held research grantsfrom the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.She is perhaps best known for her discovery and documentation of the emer-gence of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which she has been studying since 1986.Her publications include The Syntax of American Sign Language (co-authored,MIT Press, 2000) and articles in journals such as Brain and Cognition, SignLanguage Studies, and The Journal of Neurolinguistics. kegl@usm.maine.edu

Alain Kihm (CNRS, Paris) is a specialist in the morphology and syntax ofcreole languages. He published a description of the Portuguese-based creoleof Guinea-Bissau (Kriyol Syntax: The Portuguese-based Creole Language of GuineaBissau, John Benjamins, 1994) and several articles on Portuguese-based, French-based, and Arabic-based creoles. He is interested in creolization per se andits relations to language change and language emergence (e.g., his chapterin Eckardt, Jäger, and Veenstra (eds.), Variation, Selection, Development: Probingthe Evolutionary Model of Language Change; Mouton de Gruyter, 2007).alain.kihm@linguist.jussieu.fr

x Contributors

Silvia Kouwenberg lectures in linguistics at the University of the West Indies(Mona, Jamaica). Her research interests include substrate-related questions(in particular pertaining to Berbice Dutch and Jamaican), the historical contextof creole genesis, and the grammar of creoles. Her publications include AGrammar of Berbice Dutch Creole (Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), Papiamentu (withEric Murray; Lincom Europe, 1994), “Convergence and explanation in creolegenesis” (2001), “L1 transfer and the cut off point for L2 acquisition pro-cesses in creole formation” (2006), and Twice as Meaningful: Reduplicationin Pidgins, Creoles, and Other Contact Languages (editor, Battlebridge, 2003).silvia.kouwenberg@uwimona.edu.jm

John M. Lipski is Professor of Spanish at the Pennsylvania State University.His research interests include Spanish phonology, Spanish and Portuguesedialectology and language variation, the linguistic aspects of bilingualism, andthe African contribution to Spanish and Portuguese. His books include TheSpeech of the Negros Congos of Panama (John Benjamins, 1989), El español deAmérica (Cátedra, 1996), A History of Afro-Hispanic Language Contact: 5 Centuriesand 5 Continents (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Varieties of Spanish in theUnited States (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming). He is also editor ofthe journal Hispanic Linguistics. jlipski@psu.edu

Rajend Mesthrie is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English atthe University of Cape Town. He is currently President of the LinguisticsSociety of Southern Africa. Amongst his publications are the Concise Encyclope-dia of Sociolinguistics (editor, Pergamon, 2001), and English in Language Shift:The History, Structure and Sociolinguistics of South African Indian English (Cam-bridge University Press, 1992). rajend.mesthrie@uct.ac.za

Miriam Meyerhoff is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University ofEdinburgh. She has worked on Pacific creoles (especially Bislama) for morethan a decade and has published papers on social and linguistic variation in anumber of journals, as well as Constraints on Null Subjects in Bislama (Vanuatu)(2000, Pacific Linguistics), and is editor of the Benjamins Creole LanguageLibrary. Recently she has begun work on social and linguistic variation in thecreole spoken on Bequia (St. Vincent & the Grenadines). She also works onlanguage and gender, and has a number of publications in that field.Miriam.Meyerhoff@ed.ac.uk

Pieter Muysken (BA Yale University, PhD University of Amsterdam) isProfessor of Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen and Director ofthe Center for Language Studies (CLS) in Nijmegen. His research focuses onlanguage contact, language change, and creole studies. Previously he wason the staff of the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden, and he has super-vised around 35 doctoral dissertations. He is a member of the NetherlandsRoyal Academy of Sciences and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Muysken is the

Contributors xi

recipient of the Prince Bernhard Prize, the Prix des Embassadeurs, and theSpinoza prize. He was awarded an Academy Chair of the Netherlands RoyalAcademy, starting in 2008. p.muysken@let.ru.nl

Peter L. Patrick is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Essex. He isthe author of Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect (Benjamins, 1999)and co-editor, with John Holm, of Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel Outlines of18 Creole Grammars (Battlebridge, 2007). Born in New York City and raised inJamaica, his research focuses on Jamaican Patwa and African American diasporalanguages from the perspectives of language variation and change and socio-linguistics. He is concerned with as well linguistic human rights generally.He has also given expert linguistic testimony in US and UK courts, andconducted discourse analysis of clinical interaction, both involving creoles.patrickp@essex.ac.uk

Jeff Siegel is an Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of NewEngland (Australia). He is also an Associate Researcher at the University ofHawai[i, where he was formerly Foundation Director of the Charlene SatoCenter for Pidgin, Creole, and Dialect Studies. His main areas of research arethe origins of language contact varieties in the Pacific region and the use ofsuch varieties in formal education. Publications include Pidgin Grammar: AnIntroduction to the Creole Language of Hawai[i (with Kent Sakoda; Bess Press,2003) and The Emergence of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Oxford UniversityPress, 2007). jsiegel@une.edu.au

John Victor Singler is Professor of Linguistics at New York University. Heholds graduate degrees in African Area Studies (MA from SOAS, Universityof London) and linguistics (MA and PhD from UCLA). His areas of researchwithin creole studies include the sociocultural issues surrounding creole gen-esis, tense-aspect, phonology, and West African pidgins and creoles. In addi-tion, he has done research on the history of African American English, onLiberia’s Niger-Congo languages, and on Liberian literature. His publicationsinclude An Introduction to Liberian English (African Studies Center, 1981),Pidgin and Creole Tense-Mood-Aspect Systems (edited, John Benjamins, 1990).john.singler@nyu.edu

Norval S. H. Smith holds degrees in Humanities (Latin and Greek, Universityof Glasgow) and in General Linguistics (School of Oriental and AfricanStudies, University of London) and is an Associate Professor, specializing inPhonology and Creole Studies, in the Linguistics Department of the Universityof Amsterdam. In his creole work he concentrates on the Atlantic creolelanguages, with a particular interest in the creole languages of Surinameand their substrate languages. Recent publications include Creolization andContact (co-edited with Tonjes Veenstra; Benjamins, 2001) and “Contact pho-nology” (in Phonology in Context, Martha C. Pennington (ed.), Palgrave, 2006).norval.smith@gmail.com

xii Contributors

Arthur K. Spears is Professor and Chair in the Anthropology Departmentand Director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of The CityUniversity of New York, and Professor in the Linguistics and AnthropologyPrograms at its Graduate Center. He has published extensively on AfricanAmerican English, Romance-lexifier creoles, and language, race, and ideology.His most recent books are Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics inAfrica and the Americas (co-editor; Routledge, 2003) and Black Language in theEnglish-Speaking Caribbean and United States: History, Structure, Use, and Educa-tion (editor; Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). He served as President ofthe Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics 2007–9. arspears@earthlink.net

Sarah G. Thomason is the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguis-tics at the University of Michigan. She is a historical linguist who specializes incontact-induced language change and related topics, including the genesis ofpidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages. Among her publications are“Chinook Jargon in areal and historical context” (1983), Language Contact,Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (co-authored with Terrence Kaufman;University of California Press, 1988/1991), “Language mixture: ordinaryprocesses, extraordinary results” (1995), Language Contact: An Introduction(Georgetown University Press, 2001), and “Language contact and deliberatechange” (2007). thomason@umich.edu

Tonjes Veenstra (PhD University of Amsterdam) is a research fellow at theCentre for General Linguistics, Typology and Universals Research (Berlin).His research interests include syntax, morphology, language acquisition, andlanguage contact and evolution. Within creole linguistics, he has worked andpublished primarily on English-related creoles (e.g., Serial Verbs in Saramaccan:Predication and Creole Genesis, HAG, 1996), but his interests extend beyond(e.g., “The survival of inflectional morphology in French-related creoles,”with Angelika Becker, SSLA, 2003; Creolization and Contact, co-edited withNorval Smith, Benjamins, 2001; Variation, Selection, Development: Probing theEvolutionary Model of Language Change, co-edited; Mouton de Gruyter, 2007).veenstra@zas.gwz-berlin.de

Kees Versteegh is Professor of Arabic and Islam at the University ofNijmegen. He graduated in Classical and Semitic languages and specializesin historical linguistics and the history of linguistics, focusing on processesof language change and language contact. His books include Pidginizationand Creolization: The Case of Arabic (Benjamins, 1984), The Arabic LinguisticTradition (Routledge, 1997), and The Arabic Language (Columbia UniversityPress, 1997). He co-edited the Handbuch für die Geschichte der Sprach- undKommunikationswissenschaft (Mouton de Gruyter, 2000–5) and is the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (Brill, 2005–).c.versteegh@let.ru.nl

Contributors xiii

Lise Winer is Associate Professor in Second Language Education in the Fac-ulty of Education at McGill University in Montreal. She has published exten-sively on the historical and social development of language in Trinidad &Tobago (a collection of this work appeared as Badjohns, Bhaaji and BanknoteBlue: Essays on the Social History of Language in Trinidad & Tobago School ofContinuing Studies, UWI St. Augustine, 2007), has re-published new editionsof several nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels from Trinidad (Uni-versity of the West Indies Press), and has prepared the forthcoming Dictionaryof the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago (McGill Queens University Press).lise.winer@mcgill.ca

Donald Winford is Professor of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. Histeaching and research interests are in creole linguistics, variationist socio-linguistics, contact linguistics, and African American English, and he has pub-lished widely in those areas. He is the author of Predication in Caribbean EnglishCreoles (John Benjamins, 1993), and An Introduction to Contact Linguistics(Blackwell, 2003). He served as President of the Society for Caribbean Lin-guistics from 1998 to 2000, and has been editor of the Journal of Pidgin andCreole Languages since August 2001. dwinford@ling.ohio-state.edu

List of Abbreviations

abil = abilityabl = ablative caseacc = accusative caseaff = affirmativeagr = subject agreementant = anterior tenseasp = aspectaux = auxiliarycase = casecaus = causativecis = cislocative case (towards thespeaker)cl = classifier, (noun) classcomp = complementizercompl = completive aspectconn = connectivecont = continuative, continuousaspectcop = copuladef = definite articledem = demonstrativedes = desiderative modalitydet = determiner, articledim = diminutivedir = direction(al)do = direct objectdu = dualdur = durative aspectemph = emphaticexcl = exclusive (with 1p)

exclam = exclamativef = femininefoc = focusfut = future modalitygen = genitive caseger = gerundivehab = habitual aspectid = ideophoneimm = immediateimp = imperfective aspectinc = inchoativeincl = inclusive (with 1p)ind = indefinite articleinf = infinitiveinfl = inflectioninst = instrumentalint = intensifierinterj = interjectionirr = irrealis modalityloc = locative, locationm = masculinemod = modalityneg = negative, negatornom = nominalizerobj = object, objective caseobv = obviative caseom = object markerp = plural (pronoun)pass = passive morphemepast = past tense

pf = perfective, perfect aspectpl = pluralpm = predicate markerposs = possessivepost = postpositionpot = potentialppunct = past punctualprep = prepositionpres = present tenseprob = probableprog = progressive aspectpron = pronounprox = proximative aspectprt = particleq = question markerreal = reality markerrecip = reciprocalred = reduplicatedrefl = reflexive

List of Abbreviations xv

rel = relative pronoun, relativeclause introducers = singular (pronoun)sd = sudden discoverysg = singularsi = subject indexsm = subject markersrp = subject referencing pronounsub = subject, subjective casesubo = subordination markersvc = serial verb constructiontma = tense/mood/aspecttns = tensetop = topictr = transitivevb = verbalizervoc = vocative case1 = first person2 = second person3 = third person

List of Abbreviations

Introduction 1

1 Introduction

SILVIA KOUWENBERG ANDJOHN VICTOR SINGLER

1 Background

That there is a reason – and a need – for The Handbook of Pidgin and CreoleStudies in linguistics today comes from the recognition of the challenges thatpidgin and creole languages pose for linguistics as a field. At the same time,an assessment of the state of pidgin and creole studies is timely for those whowork within it.

The questions that drive pidgin and creole studies today revolve around thenature and interaction of the forces that have shaped these languages. Thesequestions are not new; they are what motivated the study of these languagesin the first place. However, in recent years insights from other branches of lin-guistics as well as careful sociohistorical studies have moved the field forward.

Creole studies has attained this point within linguistics, it can be argued, asa logical progression from three events that occurred half a century ago:

• the publication in 1957 of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures,• the publication four years earlier of Weinreich’s Languages in Contact, and• the convening in 1959 of the first international conference on creole studies

at Mona, Jamaica.

1.1 The Chomskyan paradigmThe publication of Syntactic Structures – a defining moment in the history ofmodern linguistics – has, additionally, special relevance for creole studies. TheChomskyan paradigm emphasized the interaction of language and the mind.The structure of the brain for language provides the basis for universals – theproperties that characterize and, indeed, define all human language. Further,linguists working within the Chomskyan paradigm sought to understand thenature of the acquisition of language, the way in which the intersectionof universal principles with language-particular input resulted in children’sacquisition of language.

2 Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

Given this interest in the nature of acquisition, creoles posed a challenge.The best-known creoles had the lexicons of western European languages likeEnglish and French yet were most definitely not English or French; this raisedintriguing questions about what had happened. Whatever the explanation,this was clearly not acquisition as usual.

A further point about the intersection of generative linguistics with pidginand creole studies is that, while definitions of pidgin and creole vary (and weaddress this below), a widely held view of the difference between the two wasthat a pidgin was no one’s native language, i.e., had no native speakers, whilea creole was a nativized pidgin. Given the Chomskyan interest in acquisition,specifically first language (L1) acquisition, far more attention was paid to creolesthan to pidgins.

1.2 Contact linguisticsAfter the achievements of historical linguists in the nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries in working out genetic relationships among languages (asexpressed by family trees), Uriel Weinreich’s Languages in Contact (1953) laidthe groundwork for the study of the ways in which contact between languageshas the power to change them. Despite its title, the book’s focus is overwhelm-ingly on bilingualism. Still, it moved linguists to consider external sources forchange and has more recently given birth to the field of contact linguistics,which includes bilingualism but is not confined to it. In that sense, the book’spublication can fairly be said to have launched the field of contact linguistics.

From the writings of Hugo Schuchardt (1882–8) onward, creole languageshad been shown to be problematic for the Stammbaum model, i.e., the idea thateach language was a direct descendant of some other language (in the way, forexample, that Romance languages are seen as descending from Latin). Pidginsand creoles have more than one source language; indeed, Whinnom (1971)was later to suggest that pidginization (and creolization) could only occurwhen three or more languages were involved. Thus, pidgins and creoles arecontact languages par excellence: by definition, a pidgin or creole cannot comeinto existence in a monolingual context.

At first, attention to contact phenomena and attention to pidgins and creoleswere seen as parallel yet distinct enterprises. In recent times a growing numberof scholars have seen the two as part of the same field of inquiry. An illustra-tion of this comes in recent books about contact linguistics by creolists(Thomason 2001, Winford 2003) and also books with a more narrow focuswithin creole studies that place contact linguistics in their titles (Migge 2003,Holm 2004).

1.3 The study of creole languagesThe 1959 Mona Conference was the first to assemble those who studied creolelanguages, in particular – but not exclusively – those of the Caribbean. Certainly

Introduction 3

there had been work by individual scholars prior to this (Sylvain 1936 onHaitian Creole, Hall 1943 on Tok Pisin and Hall 1953 on Haitian Creole, andTaylor 1951 on Caribbean creoles among the most prominent), but this was thefirst time that scholars who worked on pidgins and creoles had convened inthis way. In the years immediately following, with the emergence of a genera-tion of scholars from the Caribbean, linguists more generally began to recog-nize creole languages as an appropriate object of intellectual interest.

A part of the legacy of slavery in the Caribbean and elsewhere has been thestigmatization of the languages associated with slaves, i.e., creoles. Popularattitudes against pidgins and creoles were reflected in academic settings aswell. Thus, up until this period linguists’ willingness to apply the concept oflinguistic relativism – whereby every language is understood to be completeand valid – may have been extended to Hopi and Hausa, but it generallystopped short of being extended to pidgins and creoles. The value of the 1959Mona Conference, then, was its scholarly attention to these languages, itsrecognition of them as speech systems. (See the conference papers in Le Page1961.)

The first conference at Mona was followed by a second one there nine yearslater. The growth in the field of creole studies in the years between the twoconferences is reflected in the expanded format of the second conference and,especially, in the book that emerged from the conference, The Pidginization andCreolization of Languages, edited by Dell Hymes and published by CambridgeUniversity Press in 1971. More than any other, this was the book that broughtpidgins and creoles to the wider attention of linguists.

The three events we have singled out contributed three strands to the studyof pidgins and creoles that was to follow. The Mona conferences introduced acomparative component to creole studies and raised the question of how the-ories of language relate to pidgins and creoles, generativism asked how we aslinguists relate what we know about acquisition to the emergence of creoles,and the Weinreich tradition asked similar questions from the perspective oflanguage contact.

2 The Growth of a Field

Subsequent developments within linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s were toinform the basic inquiry into pidgin and creole languages. Linguists as farback as Addison Van Name (1869–70) had posited a causal link between thesocial circumstances that produced creole languages and the particular pro-perties that creole languages had in common. Now the emergence of the fieldof sociolinguistics (particularly variationist sociolinguistics, as led by WilliamLabov) legitimized creolists’ attention to the link between social forces andtheir linguistic consequences.

The observation within linguistics of a connection between Caribbean creolesand African languages dated at least as far back as Hugo Schuchardt (1882–8)

4 Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

(see Meijer & Muysken 1977). Beginning in the 1960s, much more research wasbeing carried out on African languages. As a consequence, those interested increoles with African substrates now had access to grammatical informationabout relevant African languages. The bonds between African languagesand Caribbean creoles featured prominently in subsequent scholarship,particularly that of the new generation of Caribbean linguists (e.g., Alleyne1980).

Within creole studies itself, although most of the attention thus far had beendevoted to Caribbean creoles and secondarily to Pacific pidgins, attention wasnow extended more generally to creoles and pidgins elsewhere, e.g., theIndian Ocean, West Africa, and the Pacific Northwest of North America.

2.1 Universals vs. SubstrataAcross the history of the study of pidgin and creole languages – from scholarslike Van Name, Schuchardt, and Hesseling (see Holm 1988) through the eventswe have referred to from the 1950s to the present day – the overriding ques-tion has been that of creole genesis. How do creoles come into being? What isto explain their character? Or, phrased another way, to the extent that a creoleis distinct from the language from which it draws its lexicon (the lexifierlanguage), what is the source of those differences?

By the early 1980s, how to account for creole genesis had become theonly question in creole studies. A fundamental difference in opinion pitted“universalists” and “substratists” against each other.

The primary author of the universalist position was Derek Bickerton. In aseries of works culminating in Roots of Language (1981) and “The LanguageBioprogram Hypothesis” (1984), Bickerton argued that creole languages resultwhen children, forced to acquire a first language on the basis of unprocessableinput, create language by the application of hard-wired linguistic universals.He claims that this is the situation that arises in the multilingual context ofplantation societies where the common language is a macaronic, defectivepidgin.

For many other creolists, the scenario for creole genesis that the LanguageBioprogram Hypothesis requires is crucially at odds with established factsabout the history of the colonies where the creoles arose. And various creolistspresented detailed accounts (not all of them, to be sure, fully rigorous) thatdirectly linked African language phenomena to creoles. The relevance of theAfrican data was this: if the people who created Caribbean creoles originallywere themselves either slaves brought from Africa or their locally born chil-dren, then their languages (the substrate languages) were likely to have playeda role in shaping the resultant creole.

No creolist denied the relevance of linguistic universals to creole genesis;indeed, we are hard pressed to understand what that would entail. Rather, thedivergence of opinion lay in the strength of the substrate contribution to creolegenesis, ranging from outright denial of its role (Bickerton 1986) to the assertion

Introduction 5

that in some cases at least a creole language is a relexified version of a substratelanguage (Lefebvre 1986, 1998, 2004).

Despite the attention that Bickerton’s position attracted and the appeal ofhis work outside creole studies (see Veenstra, this volume), the anti-substratismof his view isolated him. When “The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis” ap-peared in Brain and Behavioral Sciences (1984), it was accompanied by commen-taries from a number of creolists who voiced their skepticism about so absolutea universalist hypothesis. At the 1985 Amsterdam conference on “Substrataversus Universals in Creole Genesis,” most participants espoused positionswhich incorporated substrate contributions (see the papers of the conferencein the volume of the same name edited by Muysken & Smith 1986).

2.2 Pidgin and creole studies todayTwo decades after the publication of Substrata versus Universals, the debatecontinues. Virtually no one within creole studies denies a role either to thesubstrate or to (first) language acquisition. Rather, the questions that engagethe field today involve the nature of the interaction of substrate, lexifier, anduniversal forces.

During these two decades there has been far more attention to the culturalmatrix (Alleyne 1971) of creole genesis; to the demography of the setting inwhich creole languages arose; to establishing links between individual creolesand the specific African languages that would have contributed to them aswell as the variety/varieties of the lexifier language that would have beenpresent; and to the social setting in which creole languages emerged. At thesame time, creolists have increasingly framed their understanding of creolesin current theories of language, including theories of language change andlanguage contact.

Insights from the study of pidgins – in particular those of the Melanesianarchipelago – have likewise contributed to the field, raising importantquestions about the relationship between morphosyntactic expansion andnativization as well as the role of substrate languages. Finally, there has beenincreased attention to the language-particular properties of individual pidginsand creoles.

3 The Organization of the Handbook

This handbook sets out to represent the state of the art in creole studies byreflecting what creolists have learned, what the topics are that they are wrest-ling with, how pidgin and creole languages bear on larger questions aboutthe nature of language, and how different developments in linguistics outsideof the field bear on it. In preparing this volume, we have not sought to pro-vide a catalogue of all pidgin and creole languages in the world. We referthe reader in search of this to Holm (1989) and Smith (1995).

6 Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

Several chapters in Part I of the book, “Properties of Pidgins and Creoles,”tackle the formal characteristics of pidgins and creoles, while others surveythe inclusiveness of these labels. Most of what gets written about pidginsand creoles is about syntax. To do justice to the breadth of the syntax litera-ture, we have included two chapters, Winford’s on Atlantic creole syntax andMeyerhoff’s on Pacific pidgin and creole syntax, alongside Crowley’s chapteron morphology and Smith’s on phonology. Within creole studies, the relation-ship of pidgins to creoles remains vexed. Bakker’s chapter aims to definedifferent categories of language within the pidgin-creole ambit. While thepreponderance of research on pidgins and creoles is devoted to varieties whoselexifier language is a Western European one and which emerged in colonialcontexts, Versteegh’s chapter examines pidgins and creoles whose lexifier isnon-Indo-European, and which arose in a wide array of contexts. It gives a feelof the immense variety awaiting further research efforts, while also pointing tocommon patterns of development.

Part II, “Perspectives on Pidgin and Creole Genesis,” contains chapters thatapproach the central question in the field, that of genesis, from a diverse rangeof perspectives. These begin with second language acquisition (Siegel) andfirst language acquisition/the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (Veenstra).Thomason presents the perspective of historical linguistics, Mesthrie that ofcontact linguistics generally, and Muysken that of bi- and multi-lingualism inparticular. Arends, Singler, and Jourdan approach genesis from related fields –demography, social history, and anthropology, respectively.

“Pidgins/Creoles and Linguistic Explanation,” Part III, considers pidginand creole phenomena in the context of grammaticalization theory (Bruyn),markedness (Kihm), lexical semantics (Huttar), and variation studies (Patrick).In Part IV, “The Case of Signed Languages in the Context of Pidgin and CreoleStudies,” Kegl explores the emergence of signed languages in relation tocreolization, while Spears and Lipski assess African American Vernacular Eng-lish and Bozal Spanish respectively from the point of view of their putativelycreole characteristics.

In Part V, “Pidgins/Creoles in Society,” Escure argues for the centrality ofthe study of discourse in these languages. Devonish focuses on the politics oflanguage planning where pidgins/creoles are involved, while Craig considersthese languages’ role in education. Buzelin and Winer analyze the different liter-ary traditions involving French- and English-lexifier creoles of the Caribbean.

4 Themes

In the handbook’s coverage of the field of pidgin and creole studies, severalthemes recur. In the subsections that follow, we present some of them, not asan effort to provide a comprehensive summary of the handbook’s contents butrather to give a broad sense of consensus among many authors as to thenature of pidgin and/or creole languages and their genesis.

Introduction 7

4.1 On monocausal solutionsIn addressing the debate regarding pidgin/creole genesis, we chose not todivide and organize the handbook by competing theories. With the exceptionof Veenstra’s “Creole Genesis: The Impact of the Language BioprogramHypothesis,” which assesses the contribution made to the field by Bickerton’swork, there are no chapters devoted exclusively to any one of the genesistheories. Certainly, the genesis question figures in many of the chapters, withrespect to both pidgins and creoles (in the present discussion, we use “pidgin”to refer to “extended pidgin” – see section 4.2.1 for discussion of the termino-logy). Thus, Meyerhoff, in discussing developments in Pacific pidgins andcreoles, identifies the semantics of the lexifier, synchronic functions and use indiscourse, and speakers’ substrate models as having played mutually reinforc-ing roles. In her view, while substrate factors are seen as important, theyshould not necessarily be taken as the starting point for all grammaticalizedstructures in Pacific pidgins and creoles. Implied in this is the position that nosingle explanation for pidgin and creole genesis is sufficient.

This is very much in line with positions taken by other authors, and we maybe justified in postulating broad agreement among many of the contributorson the view that no single mechanism fully accounts for pidgin and creolegenesis – indeed, that if the influence of any of these diverse factors weretaken out of the equation, we would not expect to see the development ofpidgins and creoles. Whenever specific properties of these languages are underscrutiny, authors identify lexifier-related properties, substrate-related proper-ties, and properties that developed independently. This is true, for instance, ofCrowley’s discussion of morphology, of Bruyn’s discussion of grammaticalizedforms, of Smith’s discussion of marked phonemes, and of Huttar’s discussionof semantics.

By and large, the idea of “ordinary processes, extraordinary results”(Thomason 1995) is applicable to the positions taken on pidgin and creolegenesis in many of the chapters. Thus, Muysken adopts the UniformitarianHypothesis (Labov 1972), which means that the sociolinguistic and psycho-linguistic processes operant in the genesis of pidgins and creoles are the sameas those operant in contemporary multi-lingual settings. In this vein, Singlerdiscusses the relevance of covert prestige in the emergence of creole languages– an insight gained from modern sociolinguistic research.

Nevertheless, the “ordinary processes” that produce pidgin and creole lan-guages need to be better understood. Chapters such as those by Siegel on secondlanguage acquisition, Muysken on multi-lingualism, and Patrick on variationaddress the nature of some of these processes.

At the same time, Huttar identifies a glaring contradiction in the way manycreolists have treated superstrate-related properties. The focus on structuresthat appear to be different from those of the respective superstrates impliesthat structures resembling those of the superstrates do not require explanation;it also implies that creole structures in general derive from superstrate sources

8 Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

– except for those structures studied because they are different. Recently, therehas been a surge in interest in superstrate-related genesis scenarios and hencein superstrate-related properties (DeGraff 2001; Mufwene 2001). In this volume,Bruyn shows that some apparent grammaticalizations in pidgins and creolesare in fact extensions of processes already operative in the lexifier, thus point-ing to the validity of “restructuring” as a process involved in pidgin andcreole genesis (but she also identifies substrate-related grammaticalizations).Kihm points to parallelism between Romance-lexifier creoles and their lexifiersin the placement of negation and adverbs, contra DeGraff (1997) and Roberts(1999).

4.2 Nativization and terminology4.2.1 The life cycle model and nativizationAn assumption that has been widespread in creole studies over the years andindeed dates to Schuchardt (1909, p. 443, cited in Meijer & Muysken 1977,p. 30) is that a creole arises from a pidgin. In this view, known as the “lifecycle model,” the pidgin is seen as having emerged as a medium of commun-ication among people who lacked a language in common and becomes a creoleupon nativization, undergoing morphosyntactic expansion in the process. Thelife cycle model sees creoles as crucially different from prior varieties by virtueof their communicative expansion and greater regularization and holds, further,that it is nativization – when the speech variety in question becomes the firstlanguage of children born in the community – that effects these changes.

The term “pidgin” in this scenario has meant widely divergent things todifferent people. For Bickerton, the term referred to an irregular, even chaotic,speech variety, inadequate for full communication. For others, any contactvariety with few or no native speakers was designated a pidgin, no matterhow fully adequate a system of communication it might be and no matter howextensive the grammatical system. Terminology arose to distinguish amongnon-native varieties, with Mühlhäusler (1997, p. 6) dividing what had hithertobeen subsumed under “pidgin “ into “jargon,” “stable pidgin,” and “expandedpidgin.” In his chapter in this volume, Bakker distinguishes among “jargon,”“pidgin,” and “pidgincreole.” (Accordingly, what Bickerton calls a pidgin iswhat others would call a jargon.) Briefly, where such distinctions are made,there is assumed to be a line of progression in terms of morphosyntactic elabo-ration along a cline, from jargon initially to creole ultimately.

The central position of the Caribbean in the history of pidgin and creolescholarship has had as a consequence that the varieties most studied have allbeen their speakers’ first languages and have long ago undergone nativization.Hence, the life cycle model and, especially, the role – or non-role – ofnativization in creole genesis could not be tested on the basis of Caribbeanlanguage data. Rather, it is contact varieties of the Pacific that provide themost apt testing ground for it. In particular, varieties of Melanesian Pidgin areat various stages of nativization, yet the evidence from them generally argues

Introduction 9

against the idea that there is a direct and incontrovertible link between theirgrammatical elaboration and their nativization.

This point is discussed at length in Meyerhoff’s and Bakker’s chapters, butothers make similar points: Crowley points to mismatches between native/non-native status and morphological elaboration, where non-native varietiessometimes display properties one would expect to see in native varietiesinstead. Bruyn’s discussion of the development of the Melanesian Pidgin futuremarker baimbai/bai illustrates that innovative developments are not confined tocreole varieties but take place as well in extended pidgins. Escure points outthat there is little merit in differentiating pidgin discourse from creole dis-course. Versteegh points to cases where a speech community contains bothfirst and second language speakers of the same variety. Veenstra, in elaborat-ing the social context in which Hawaiian Creole English was formed, showsthat the grammatical features ascribed to nativization in Bickerton’s work onthis language emerged first in the non-native speech of a generation of bilinguals(Roberts 2000). Several authors point to extra-linguistic factors which bringabout morphosyntactic elaboration. Bakker’s view is that the social trigger forthe transformation of a non-native communication system into a full-fledgedhuman language is the formation of a speech community, and that nativizationplays only a minor role at most. Kegl, in her discussion of the emergence ofsigned languages, similarly assigns a pivotal role to the presence of a commun-ity of “speakers” – specifically a Deaf community – and argues that a criticalmass has to be attained for language emergence to take place. She does,however, point out that the community must include a cohort of “language-ready” children and argues that the gestural communication systems whicharise outside of such a context do not constitute language. The latter includethe gestural communication systems of mixed communities of hearing anddeaf where the deaf are a minority, and the gestural system of the first genera-tion of students in Nicaraguan schools for the deaf.

In many ways, the views expressed in these and other chapters assign apivotal role to language use as driving developments of expansion, whether inpidgins or in creoles. Thus, Meyerhoff’s view is that discourse is “both thestarting point and the primary medium for the development of syntax.” Jourdansees pidgins and creoles as the result of negotiation of linguistic meaning inthe broader context of negotiation of culture, and identifies social interaction,power, the ideological dimension of culture, and human agency as constitutingthe “matrix” of pidgin and creole genesis. Siegel sees the adoption of L1 featuresinto the contact variety occurring during a phase where its use is extendedinto different domains; speakers find themselves challenged to use a variety ofwhich they have acquired too little, specifically to use it in new domains.

If we recognize that the traditional distinction between pidgin and creolebased on non-native vs. native speaker status is of little consequence in pre-dicting either their social functions or the extent of their grammatical elabora-tion, the logical consequence is that the terms themselves become less usefulas labels for particular kinds of languages. Indeed, where Pacific and West

10 Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

African pidgins and creoles are discussed, the terms are felt to be an encum-brance, to stand in the way of achieving proper insight in the developmentsthat gave rise to these languages. Versteegh points to this problem when heposits that the continued use of the terms “pidgin” and “creole” with theimplications for (non-)native status directs our attention toward what “alanguage can be” – that is, on issues of prototypicality – and away from theprocesses of restructuring which give rise to these languages and the potentialrange of their outcomes. Additionally, the life cycle model is based onassumptions that no longer stand up to scrutiny about the structure of theplantation societies where creole languages emerged; hence, its applicabilityeven in the Caribbean context can be questioned, as argued by Singler.

Different authors deal with the terminological problem in different ways.Thus, Jourdan consistently uses the term “pidgins” to refer to both non-nativeand native varieties – including those of the Caribbean, which are usuallythought of as the prototypical “creoles.” In contrast, Meyerhoff and Devonishboth prefer to speak of “creoles” for languages that are used for the full rangeof social functions, irrespective of native/non-native status – including the stilllargely non-natively spoken Melanesian pidgins. Thomason takes non-native/native status to distinguish pidgins from creoles – as is traditionally done –but uses the term “pidgin” to refer to fully crystallized languages, excludingrudimentary pidgins from that label, although she allows that a pidgin whichremains a secondary language used for quite limited purposes may be limitedin lexicon and grammar.

Alternative to all this is the viewpoint, associated with the work of authorssuch as Chaudenson and Mufwene, which holds that creole languages emergefrom successive cycles of approximation of their lexifiers, and are their des-cendants; as pointed out in Singler’s chapter, this viewpoint entails that there isno prior pidginization.

4.2.2 Other terminological issuesIn the previous section, we pointed to the difficulties surrounding the differentways in which authors have used “pidgin.” In this section we address otherterminological points.

Bickerton (1981) classifies creoles as fort creoles, plantation creoles, andmaroon creoles. He bases his distinction on the social context in which thepertinent languages emerged. The distinction has become widely accepted,although the question of the formal typological implications remains unre-solved. Fort creoles, the creoles which originated around European forts orsettlements, often in mixed relationships (local mothers, European fathers),arose in situations that are presumed to have involved no displacement for the“substrate” population (although this claim is probably disputable, at least forsome of the West African forts where the designation is commonly applied),whereas plantation creoles and maroon creoles arose in contexts of displace-ment. The plantation and maroon creoles are distinguished by access to

Introduction 11

superstrate speakers in the plantation context and isolation from the superstratepopulation in the maroon context. In fact, however, maroon communities sub-sisted on the fringes of plantation societies and their survival often dependedon considerable contact with plantation populations. Some maroon communi-ties did develop linguistic practices different from – although related to –those of the plantation societies, e.g., those in Suriname, Jamaica, and, in oneinstance, Colombia; however, for most known maroon communities, no spe-cial linguistic practices have been documented. Where relevant, the chaptersin this book consider plantation creole data alongside maroon creole data;they do so without reflecting on the distinctions. Fort creoles are not consid-ered here.

The creolist community has appropriated the terms “superstrate” and“substrate” from historical linguistics but has altered their meanings in theprocess. For creolists, “superstrate” ordinarily refers to the language of thesocially and economically dominant group. In colonial situations, this is usu-ally the language of the colonial power. It typically provides the basis for thelexicon for the emergent pidgin or creole. When it does so, it is also referred toas the “lexifier language.” “Substrate” refers to the first languages of the soci-ally and economically subordinated populations; in plantation situations thespeakers of substrate languages usually comprise the labor force. Sometimes,as Bakker points out, there are pidgins whose lexical basis is a language that isnot associated with socioeconomic or political power; however, the knowninstances of this are limited to unexpanded pidgins. Versteegh similarly pointsout that contact varieties may emerge in situations where the different linguis-tic groups are equal, but says that such situations are rare. The terms aregenerally used by the authors in this handbook with reference to situationswhere the socioeconomic conditions were such that substrate speakers werepolitically and economically subordinate to superstrate speakers.

The term “lexifier” (in place of superstrate) has the advantage that it isdevoid of implications with regard to socioeconomic status, but its adoptionleaves a gap in that no straightforward alternative term is available for thenotion of “substrate.”

Apart from the terms substrate and superstrate, the term “adstrate” has hadsome relevance in the field, designating languages that have either had aperipheral presence in the contexts where pidgins and creoles emerged orcame on the scene after pidgin and creole genesis. In either case, it is assumedthat the pertinent languages were not in a position to make significant contri-butions to the grammar. In the Caribbean, indigenous languages – where theysurvived European onslaught – and late-arriving African and Asian languagesare considered adstrates. Since adstrates are not considered to have relevanceto pidgin and creole genesis, they do not figure in the present pages beyondpassing mention.

The “creole continuum” (originally the “post-creole continuum”) is a modelposited by DeCamp (1971) to designate the situation that arose in, among

12 Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

other places, Guyana (Bickerton 1975, Rickford 1987) and Jamaica (Patrick1999). In both these cases, the continued co-existence of creole and lexifier hasresulted in intermediate varieties, such that the term “creole” is ambiguouslyused to refer to a range of varieties. In order to distinguish within the range,the terms “basilect,” “mesolect,” and “acrolect” are used to designate varietiesfarthest from, intermediate, and closest to the lexifier, with the possibility offurther differentiation within, e.g., the basilect (cf., for example, Singler 1996).Although the competence of speakers within the continuum tends to correlatewith the rural–urban divide and with socioeconomic status, continuum variationdoes not simply translate to geographical or social variation. Most speakerswill be competent in more than one variety, and it is possible for individualsto have competence in varieties that are discontinuous on the continuum(Bickerton 1975).

In some work by creolists, particularly those dealing with the Caribbean, theterms basilect, mesolect, and acrolect have been extended to designate whatmight be called a pan-creole continuum, with, for example, Bajan andTrinidadian Creole – because they are deemed closer to English than are mostother Caribbean English Creoles – designated acrolectal and mesolectal, respec-tively. Still within this paradigm, it is sometimes the case that the Surinamesecreoles, because they are much further from English than any of the otherEnglish-lexifier languages of the Caribbean, are given a designation like “radi-cal” or “conservative.” In his chapter on Atlantic syntax, Winford designatesthem “radical.” Arends discusses some of the demographic factors which mayhave contributed to the status of creoles on this continuum.

The terms “creolization” and “pidginization” have been subject to a rangeof definitions. As a general rule, pidginization is identified with simplification,and creolization with expansion, as in the following observation by Hymes(1971a, p. 84): “Pidginization is usually associated with simplification in outerform, creolization with complication in outer form.” For those who define acreole language as a nativized pidgin, the term creolization is often simplyidentified with nativization. As a result, except when explicitly defined, thedomain of “creolization” is ambiguous. A further point in this regard is that,while creolists may tend to have positions regarding what they consider to bethe most important contributing factors in pidginization and creolization (suchas the substrate, universals of second language acquisition, and the like), theyrarely have a clear position on the actual mechanisms involved in these pro-cesses. Exceptions to this statement include Bickerton’s Language BioprogramHypothesis (1984 and elsewhere) and Lefebvre’s Relexification Hypothesis (1998and elsewhere), each of which postulates very specific mechanisms by whichfeatures enter creole languages. Both proposals have been subject to the criti-cism that no single mechanism is able to account for the full range of results,and both have required their authors to put forth auxiliary hypotheses tomake up for their lack of explanatory power, thus coming much closer tocompromise positions than their authors allow for.

Introduction 13

4.3 Pidgin/creole typologyAs Mesthrie points out, from a synchronic point of view, creoles are “normal”languages (see Muysken 1988 and Singler, this volume, for the same point). Itis only for certain linguistic inquiries, with either a technical historical focus ora typological focus, that their status as contact languages is at issue. Thus,Thomason, who approaches the subject from the point of view of historicallinguistics, considers pidgins and creoles of interest as a class of languagesbecause of their historically “mixed” nature.

Nevertheless, the idea that we can identify certain characteristics with pidginand creole languages has endured – although many authors now correlatethese characteristics with social expansion rather than with nativization –alongside an increasing awareness that there is a great deal of structural diver-sity across pidgins and creoles. For instance, Bakker, who argues that distinc-tions between pidgins and creoles have primarily a social basis, still recognizesthat the social categories appear to correlate with structural features.

Winford identifies structures which are shared across many – if not all –Atlantic Creoles in the areas of word order, tense-aspect marking, movementprocesses (in passivization and focus constructions, etc.), serial verb construc-tions, and so on, while cautioning that we can find the full gamut of languagesranging from those that are quite close in structure to their superstrates toothers that diverge quite significantly even within a single region and within asingle lexifier group, for instance English-lexifier creoles of the Caribbean.

Singler considers the proposition that at least some of the shared features in,for instance, Atlantic creoles, may be the result of diffusion, as strongly arguedin the work of Baker (1999) and Baker and Huber (2001). While Singler sup-ports diffusion in principle, he points to serious flaws in the methodology bywhich diffusion is purportedly established.

Kihm addresses the question whether creole structures can be consideredto instantiate “unmarkedness,” arguing that this term has to be interpretedin the Chomskyan sense of referring to core grammar, and more specificallythat “unmarked” is to be interpreted as referring to parallelism in complexitybetween syntactic and LF representations, and that this represents the defaultoption in grammar.

One author who points to a possible difference between expanded pidginsand creoles is Huttar. In his chapter on semantic structure he identifies theauxiliary status of Tok Pisin as the reason that certain semantic domains in itslexicon suffer from lack of elaboration as compared to the substrate languages.A similar point is made by Jourdan, based on an evaluation of the system ofkinship terms in Melanesian Pidgin. Thus, prolonged co-existence with ances-tral languages may well mean that elaboration of culturally important seman-tic domains is held back – contrary to what one might expect. In contrast,rapid nativization of a creole language, which presumably goes hand in handwith equally rapidly diminished use of ancestral languages, means that the

14 Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

creole must be the vehicle for expression of culturally important concepts,which are expected to derive at least to some extent from the substratelanguage(s), as shown for Ndyuka in Huttar’s own work.

Two chapters that look anew at the presence of creole features in varietiesthat are generally considered not to be creoles are those by Lipski and Spears,which consider this issue in regard to bozal Spanish and African AmericanEnglish, respectively.

4.4 Applied issuesThe recognition of the morphosyntactic independence of pidgin and creolelanguages from their lexifiers (e.g., Muysken 2004) has led to a recognitionamong linguists in pidgin- and creole-speaking societies that the institutionsof these societies need to make use of the pidgin/creole in order to functionefficiently. In particular, linguists have long argued that vernacular literacy isa prerequisite to educational success. This issue is taken up in Craig’s chapter.Devonish’s chapter addresses the role of the state in efforts to include orexclude these languages from public functions.

Pidgin/creole-speaking societies usually have long-standing oral traditionswhich make use of the vernacular. This “orality” is often seen as a factor in thelack of interest both on the part of pidgin/creole-speaking populations andtheir governments to accord official status to these languages. Buzelin andWiner’s chapter considers the ways in which writers of the Caribbean havebrought creole within the purview of a literary tradition and have struggledwith questions of orality and literacy.

REFERENCES

Alleyne, Mervyn (1971) Acculturation and the cultural matrix of creolization. In: Hymes(ed.), pp. 169–86.

Alleyne, Mervyn (1980) Comparative Afro-American. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Baker, Philip (1999) Investigating the origin and diffusion of shared features among the

Atlantic English Creoles. In: Philip Baker and Adrienne Bruyn (eds.) St Kitts andthe Atlantic Creoles: The Texts of Samuel Augustus Mathews in Perspective. London:University of Westminster Press, pp. 315–64.

Baker, Philip and Magnus Huber (2001) Atlantic, Pacific, and world-wide features inEnglish-lexicon contact languages. English World-Wide 22, 157–208.

Bickerton, Derek (1975) Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Bickerton, Derek (1981) Roots of Language. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Bickerton, Derek (1984) The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain

Sciences 7, 173–221.Bickerton, Derek (1986) Beyond Roots: The five-year test. Journal of Pidgin and Creole

Languages 1, 225–32.