Noun phrases in creole languages: A multi-faceted approach (review)

Since the early twentieth century, creole studies have been concerned with the question of how these new languages came into being, whether they form a separate class, and whether the study of these languages enhances our understanding of language change and its relation to human knowledge of language. In search of answers to these questions, many investigations on creole languages have centered on cross-creole similarities found in the clausal domain. This effort has led linguists to establish a number of properties that are commonly ascribed to creoles as a class (e.g. isolating morphology, fixed subject-verb-object order, free-standing morphemes that encode inflectional properties in the clause and occur in the fixed order of tense-mood-aspect). These features appear to be frequent enough in creole languages to be regarded by some linguists (e.g. Bickerton 1981, McWhorter 2001) as defining properties of the creole prototype.

Fewer studies, however, have dealt with noun phrases in creoles; it is thus not clear whether the cross-creole parallelism observed in the clausal domain extends to the nominal domain. In the context of the generative framework, where one assumes structural parallelism between the sentential and nominal domains (e.g. Abney 1987, Szabolcsi 1987, 1994, Longobardi 1994, Aboh 2004a, b), this lack of fuller information undermines our understanding of the general structural properties of (creole) languages. The present volume is very welcome because it fills this gap.

This volume offers a thorough examination of nominal expressions in a variety of creoles, laying the main emphasis on the interpretative properties of overt determiners, plural markers, and bare nouns. It comprises fifteen chapters on creole languages with different lexifiers (i.e. source languages): Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch. Each lexifier has been given a separate section in the book. The creole languages covered in these five parts are Cape Verdean Creole, Santome, Papiamentu, Guinea-Bissau Creole, Mindao Chabacano, Réunionnais Creole, Lesser Antillean, Haitian Creole, Mauritian Creole, Seychellois, Sranan, Jamaican Creole, and Berbice Dutch Creole. Though African American English (AAE) is considered by many to be a restructured variety of English rather than a creole, the book contains a section on this language as well. Another section deals with a comparative analysis of Romance Creoles. These seven sections are bookended by introductory and postface chapters written by the editors.

Even though the volume has a well-defined theme, the contributions are rather diverse. They include theoretically oriented (generativist) and descriptive studies, synchronic and diachronic studies, studies that examine a single creole, and studies that offer a comparison of a creole to its source languages, other creoles, or contact languages. This diversity is reflected in the subtitle of the volume: ‘A multi-faceted approach’.

In Ch. 1, ‘Noun phrases in creole languages: An introductory overview’ (3–34), editors Marlyse Baptista and Jacqueline Guéron lay the foundations for the analysis of noun phrases as presented in the following chapters and inform the reader of the issues relevant to creole studies. They identify two main research questions:

1. i. In what respect do the relatively stable determiner systems of the creoles described in this volume differ from those of their lexifiers and/or from the African languages that contributed to their genesis? Can the input from the lexifiers and African languages be clearly identified? Does this input remain unchanged in the newly-formed creole?

2. ii. Are the creole determiner systems under study similar or even comparable? The one feature they have in common is a use of bare nouns which is much more widespread than that of their respective lexifiers. Do the bare nouns in the creoles examined here cover the same semantic range or do the meanings of bare nouns vary from one creole to the next? Are the uses of overt determiners and plural marking similar to or distinct from those of the lexifier languages? (6–7)

Ch. 2, ‘Bare nouns...