Deconstructing creole (review)

Midway through my undergraduate studies, a friendly lecturer warned me that the cosy truths I had learned in my first year would all have to be unlearned before I graduated. Perhaps that is also the message of this timely book, which seeks to challenge much of what we 'know' about creole languages: in fact, to test and critique many of the cosiest 'truths' that have become established over the years as the field of creole studies has matured. The particular 'truth' that the contributors to this volume seek to deconstruct is the notion of 'creole uniqueness', the idea that creoles are a distinct group of languages with special features that make them different from all others. As Ansaldo and Matthews say in their introductory chapter, 'the ultimate goal is to overcome the artificial dichotomy between creole and non-creole languages, in order to integrate the study of creolization phenomena into mainstream linguistics, i.e. the study of language variation and language creation' (3).

The notion of creole 'uniqueness' or 'exceptionalism' has become sufficiently established in the collective consciousness of creolists and linguists to be taken as 'fact' by many. It is supported, according to Ansaldo and Matthews (4), by three parallel lines of enquiry that seek to demonstrate that creoles are 'special' with regard to (i) their structure, (ii) their acquisitional environment, and (iii) their differentness from 'old' languages. The notion is vulnerable on all three counts, as individual chapters in this volume show. Refutation of these points, say Ansaldo and Matthews, will lead to acceptance of the fact that creoles are not a particular TYPE of language but rather the 'products of high-contact environments in specific sociohistorical settings' (ibid.), and allow the field of creole studies to return to the mainstream of linguistics. Furthermore, they argue, 'exceptionalist scenarios' must be seen as 'ideological constructs that viewed speakers of creole languages as having failed in one way or another, in respect to language evolution, language acquisition and language creation'.

The first of the volume's two parts, 'Typology and grammar', mainly addresses the question of the 'exceptionality' of creoles in terms of their structural characteristics. Three papers question the pervasive claim of 'simplicity'. The assertion that creoles have simple morphology is attacked by JOSEPH T. FARQUHARSON in 'Typology and grammar: Creole morphology revisited'. Farquharson says that creolists have made the claim without paying due attention to the facts. He adduces data from several creoles, including Haitian, Jamaican, Saramaccan, and Berbice Dutch, to show that in fact morphology—especially derivational morphology—can be substantially complex.

Two further chapters continue this theme. In 'The role of typology in language creation: A descriptive take', ENOCH O. ABOH and UMBERTO ANSALDO examine noun-phrase inflectional morphology in Caribbean creoles and Sri Lanka Malay in relation to the input languages. They conclude that the outcomes are the result of a process of feature competition and selection from a 'feature pool' at the time of formation of the language. Relevant to this process are the syntax/ discourse prominence of the features concerned, their relative markedness or otherwise, and their frequency (63). Given these principles, they argue, it is possible to show that many of the properties of Suriname creoles (so-called 'radical creoles') result from shared typological properties in the African and European input languages—and moreover, that the creoles are more mixed than previously suggested (ibid.) By contrast, Sri Lanka Malay shows noun-phrase inflections that are arguably not 'simple', but can be traced to prominent features of the adstrate languages Tamil and Sinhala.

In 'Creoles, complexity and associational semantics' DAVID GIL tests the notion of 'simplicity' with respect to compositional semantics, 'the ways in which the meanings of complex expressions are derived from the meanings of their constituent parts' (71). He uses experimental data to measure the availability of associational interpretations in a range of languages. If creole grammars are 'the world's simplest grammars' (a quote from McWhorter 1997 that Gil repeatedly challenges) then...