Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages (review)

This is an edited collection of almost uniformly excellent papers presented at a conference with the same name at the University of Regensburg in June 1998; other papers from this conference have apparently been published elsewhere. In accordance with the general principles for multi-authored volumes in this series, it opens with an extensive introduction by the editors which outlines the content of the papers included.

The papers are divided into four sections, with the first consisting of a single chapter, a solid study of semi-creoles by John Holm. The other three each contain several papers. The second section is devoted to theoretical matters and contains seven papers, the third has studies of aspects of restructuring in English-lexifier creoles (principally Atlantic ones, among which Donald Winford’s paper on creole formation and the ‘intermediate’ creole status of Bajan stands out by its depth), and the last looks at restructuring in Romance-lexifier creoles (two papers on creoles lexified by French, one on bozal Spanish by John Lipski, one by Armin Schwegler on the reasons for the nondecreolization of Palenquero, and a final paper examining African influences on restructuring in the development of Santiago Capeverdean by Jürgen Lang).

Including the introduction, there are nineteen papers. I highlight here some of the ‘theoretical’ papers as these are the most likely to attract the attention of readers seeking to find new theoretical models to assist their own research. Philip Baker’s paper on ‘Theories of creolization and the nature and degree of restructuring’ (41–63) draws on data (including some early philological material) from Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Atlantic creoles to provide an elucidation of his ‘constructivist’ theory of creolistics. This asserts that many earlier interpretations of basic assumptions in creolistics are misguided. Baker posits a process in the course of which a ‘medium for interethnic communication’ (devised because groups of people have no other common language) expands both in structure and in range of social functions, gathers general social acceptance, and becomes a ‘medium for community solidarity’ (a term which cannot simply be equated with ‘creole’). John McWhorter discusses the issues involved in ‘Defining “creole” as a synchronic term’ (85–124) in the light of his creole prototype (first presented as a paper at the 1998 Regensburg Conference and described in Language 74.788–818, 1998) and presents further evidence from an impressive variety of languages to support the importance of the three criteria around which the creole prototype centers.

In ‘Two types of restructuring in French creoles’ (135–62), Ulrich Detges has drawn attention to the significance of grammaticalization and reanalysis in structural change in a language and uses this in a discussion of tense markers in these creoles. Finally, in ‘Reassessing the role of demographics in language restructuring’ (185–213), Mikael Parkvall combines several demographic and statistical approaches previously used in creolistics, adds some of his own, and presents a carefully nuanced index for measuring the relative degree of structural distance from lexifier, according to which the most ‘radical’ creoles such as Sranan are shown quantitatively to have the highest positive scores whereas mildly-restructured varieties such as Bermudan English have strongly negative scores. He ties this in deftly with what is known about the duration of slavery and the dating of numerical dominance of slaves in the population for 20 relevant communities. This paper, like so many others in the collection, is a nice instantiation of the multidisciplinary approach—combining history, mathematics, language, and much more—which has made creolistics such a potent research field over the past few decades and which gives it a vibrancy still notable within modern linguistics.