Language Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles (review)

As McWhorter says in his preface (vii), originality was the criterion for selecting these fifteen papers from presentations at meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in 1996 and 1997. The result is a volume of provocative studies, some of which will no doubt prove controversial. Since space precludes detailed consideration of each chapter, I discuss them via a number of (interrelated) themes.

Several chapters apply theoretical models to creole structure and genesis. Marlyse Baptista (1–33) shows how minimalist syntactic theory can account for descriptive puzzles in the Capeverdean Creole verb. John Singler (335–51) uses optimality theory to examine substrate and universal influences on the phonology of Coastal and Interior Vernacular Liberian English. Exploring the question of ‘perfection’ in language, Alain Kihm (163–99) concludes that creoles are not perfect but show the marks of perfection from their ‘unnatural’ birth. George Lang (443–57) discusses the implications of chaos theory for creolization.

Historical reconstruction is a recurrent theme. Surveying the dialectological situation of Capeverdean Creole, Angela Bartens (35–61) proposes a ‘componential diffusion model’ for the separate creolization processes by which the dialect cluster arose. Bettina Migge (201–34) examines historical and synchronic data to argue for substrate influences in the development of property items in Suriname Plantation Creole. Addressing claims about the history of Sango, William Samarin (301–33) compares Sango with its lexical source to demonstrate its pidgin status. J. Clancy Clements and Ahmar Mahboob (459–97) argue for the interaction of mutual accommodation and universals in the formation of wh-words in creoles. Examining various factors conditioning preverbal kom in Nigerian Pidgin English, Sali Tagliamonte (353–82) shows that it is highly grammaticized and exhibits little evidence of influence from English.

STéphane Goyette (103–31) and Anthony Naro and Maria Scherre (235–55) investigate creolization in the Romance languages. Goyette suggests that creolization played a role in the genesis of Early Romance. In a variationist analysis of European Portuguese, Naro and Scherre demonstrate that variable (non) agreement in Brazilian Portuguese is better explained by ‘natural drift’ than by creolization.

Two chapters discuss the sociolinguistic and ideological contexts of creolization. Paul Garrett (63–101) describes the ‘high’ register of Kwéyòl (St. Lucia) which is emerging as an alternative to the official language (English). Sarah Roberts (257–300) proposes a three-generation model of nativization for Hawaiian Creole reminiscent of other situations of language shift.

Probably the two most controversial chapters are those dealing with the prototypical creole tense-mood-aspect (TMA) system. John Holm et al. (133–61) present examples to argue that this system represents an interesting ‘statistical tendency’ (though they provide no statistics) rather than a categorical prediction. Similarly, Donald Winford (383–442), offering a comprehensive analysis of Sranan, concludes that while many creoles share a core of TMA categories, their use and meaning are not identical.

The range of data and methods employed in this volume reflects the diversity and liveliness of creole studies. The most promising future direction of research arising from these papers is the use of quantitative and theoretical techniques to resolve longstanding issues in description and reconstruction.