Against Creole Exceptionalism (Redux)

1. Reconsidering creole exceptionalism?

The primary goal of my Discussion Note ‘Against Creole exceptionalism’ (Language 79.2.391–410, hereafter ACE) was to demystify a variety of past and present beliefs—widespread in and outside academia— according to which Creole languages constitute an exceptional class on phylogenetic and/or typological grounds.

Derek Bickerton’s reply (‘Reconsidering Creole exceptionalism’, Language 80.4.828–33) does not address the main empirical, theoretical, and historiographical arguments in ACE. Instead, he mistakenly reduces its scope to an ‘attack [of] two “dogmas” ’ (p. 828). In essence, his response is an attempt to defend both his language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH) and its extrapolation to language-evolution scenarios, both of which are countered in ACE. In effect, Bickerton’s reply provides a handy example of the dogmatic nature of Creole exceptionalism as he repeats some of the very articles of faith that ACE argues against. Thus I use his reply as yet another case study of the facile intellectual practices that have made Creole exceptionalism so resilient among many, though fortunately not all, creolists.

Moreover, Bickerton criticizes what he perceives as unacknowledged shifts in my recent thinking on Creole formation; I address that criticism as well.

2. On the pidgin-to-creole life cycle

In the LBH-based scenario, Plantation Creoles such as Haitian Creole (HC) are ‘new languages … formed in … a single generation from input that can be characterised as a jargon or early-stage pidgin with little if any grammatical structure…. [T]he work of new language creation can be attributed largely if not exclusively to children’ (Bickerton 1999:49–50).

Furthermore, under the LBH, since bound morphemes generally are ‘lost completely in the process of pidginization that immediately precedes creolization or (less often) assimilated by lexical items’ (Bickerton 1999:69, n. 16), the creolizing child has to create a Creole’s morphological apparatus from the Pidgin’s structureless pieces. It is thus predicted that affixes from a lexifier language such as French are not transmitted to a corresponding Creole such as HC. This claim, though, was falsified in DeGraff 2001a (see also Fattier 1998), which documents robust, stable, and fully integrated morphological resources, etymologically related to French and native to HC.¹ Moreover, work on Creole morphology in recent years (witness the various papers in Plag 2003b) reveals complex and fascinating facts that invalidate predictions that Creoles should have little or no morphology. In other words, the LBH with its morphological bottleneck is empirically untenable.

3. On the development of hawai’ian creole

According to Bickerton, ‘Roberts’s [archival] research … show[s] that a virtually structureless pidgin preceded and accompanied the emergence of [Hawai’i Creole English; hereafter HCE] … Significantly, ACE contains no reference to this research’ (p. 830). What Bickerton fails to note is that Roberts has shown that the LBH is categorically refuted by sociohistorical and linguistic evidence from the development of HCE—an allegedly Caribbean-like Plantation Creole that, for Bickerton, was abruptly ‘originated by children born in Hawaii in the 1890s’ (1999:68, n. 5).

Roberts (1998:35–36, 2000:288) argues against any catastrophic ‘single generation’ scenario for HCE formation; her archival data document a somewhat more ‘gradual’ development of HCE—with some ‘hitherto-unsuspected stages in [its] development’. Moreover, Roberts finds that ‘lexically and syntactically, HCE is … closer to English than Mauritian [Creole] is to French [its lexifier]…. HCE’s lexicon contains no systematic deviations from English … Its syntax also incorporates English reflexives, relative pronouns and other features which diverge structurally from lexifier forms in Mauritian and other Creoles’ (2000:294). Finally, Roberts, unlike Bickerton, excludes neither the role of adults nor substrate influence in the emergence of HCE (Roberts 1999, 2000, 2002). Pace Bickerton’s characterization of Roberts’s results (p. 830), she herself concludes that ‘the classic Bickertonian conception of nativization, in which children of immigrants abruptly acquire their parents’ pidgin as their mother tongue, is inconsistent with observed facts’ (2000:257).

Mufwene (2004:470–71) overviews key differences between the socio-historical matrices of the formation of Caribbean Plantation Creoles versus that of HCE, including the possibility that HCE developed not on plantations...