Pidgins are rudimentary languages that emerge in settings where multiple languages come into contact with each other and speakers are under intense pressure to create a new mode of communication for trade and work purposes (many older creoles emerged in the context of the slave trade).
Instead, its purpose is to introduce readers to the main lines of thought in creolistics regarding the nature and origins of the syntactic properties of pidgins and creoles and the features that typically differentiate pidgin syntax from creole syntax.
Michaelis, Susanne Maria, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber, eds. (2013). Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Find this resource: Mufwene, Salikoko (2001). The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Find this resource: Mufwene, Salikoko (2008).
There are two great features on Course Hero: The first is course-specific study resources. This lets you avoid generic online information. For example, you can look for Bio 101 class notes from Rutgers University or English Composition study guides for UCLA. Another great feature on Course Hero is 24/7 Homework Help.
The investigation of pidgin and creole syntax has been a fruitful field of study for many decades. Linguists have explored the subject, using a variety of frameworks and methodologies, including sociolinguistic, generative, descriptive, and experimental approaches, among others. The sociolinguistic literature is a dominant approach in creolistics and has involved the study of many features, including the “be” copula ( Rickford, 1990a ), Tense and Aspect markers ( Rickford, 1987; Sankoff, 2002; Winford, 2006 ), number marking ( Rickford, 1990b ), pronominal systems (Meyerhoff, 1997, 2000 ), and the noun phrase ( Meyerhoff, 2002 ), to mention just a few subjects.
There is a common assumption in the literature that there is a pidgin-creole cycle, whereby pidgins are no one’s first languages, whereas creoles are nativized and typically evolve from pidgins. The syntax of pidgins is assumed to be unstable, inconsistent, and subject to much variation, whereas in contrast, the syntax of creoles is consistent , elaborate, and stable by virtue of having acquired native speakers. The situation is, however, much more complex, as few creoles show evidence of having gone through a pidgin stage and extended pidgins like Tok Pisin may acquire native speakers over time. Consequently, nativization is not always a reliable criterion to determine the pidgin versus creole status of a language, and the pidgin-creole life cycle remains subject to much debate. There is, however, a broad consensus that creole languages result from intense contact between multiple languages and involve linguistic features from a socially dominant superstrate language and those of substrate languages. In most cases, the lexicon of a given creole is derived from the superstrate. However, the source of creole grammatical features, including their morphosyntactic, semantic, and phonological properties, remains controversial. One school of thought posits that creoles can be characterized by feature clusters that instantiate language universals; such clusters would make them distinct on linguistic grounds from other natural languages. Another school of thought argues that the features found in creoles are akin to those found in interlanguages; as a result, creoles are said to reflect processes of second language acquisition. Another prominent view is that creoles are a mixture of the multiple grammars that contribute to their individual genesis; as hybrid grammars, some of their features are believed to be traceable to their source languages, including both their substrates and superstrates.
Aboh (2009) focuses on Saramaccan Creole and explores its verbal domain where, he argues, semantic and syntactic features from the source languages are also recombined.
For instance, both Haitian and French are endowed with prenominal and postnominal adjectives, whereas Gungbe displays postnominal adjectives only. However, one should note that the fact that Haitian can have prenominal and postnominal adjectives like French is not sufficient evidence that the dual position may have been transferred from the superstrate. This might simply reflect some universal language preference for a wider range of adjectival positions. I revisit the role of universals when I introduce Bobyleva’s work.
The German philologist Hugo Schuchardt ( 1881, 1883) was the first to note the challenge of fitting creole languages in the genealogical tree that philologists had designed and which divided Indo-European languages into distinct language families. From the very start, it has been clear to creolists and historical linguists alike that creoles do not constitute a family of languages in the genetic sense, but there has been a persistent view that they constitute a “type” based on the common syntactic properties they supposedly share. 1
This overview includes proposals that cast creoles as a “type” of languages, proposals that view creoles as interlanguages and resulting from second language acquisition, and proposals that consider them as hybrid grammars yielding innovative feature recombinations due to language contact. It also discusses the benefits of the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, as it lays out a promising new direction in the investigation of pidgins and creoles by offering systematic comparisons of a large sample of creoles and their source languages. This collaborative Atlas provides broad empirical coverage, testing the hypotheses reflected by the various positions and schools of thought discussed in this chapter while unveiling the rich diversity of creole syntactic features.