reviews: creoles

Contact Linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes

By Carol Myers-Scotton

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 356. paper $45.00. ISBN 0198299532.

Reviewed by Alison

Nicolle (BTL, East Africa) and Steve Nicolle (BTL, East Africa)

A creole can have several natural languages contributing to its Matrix language system, and the Embedded language is the superstratal lexifier.

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Defining Creole

By John H. McWhorter

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 444. paper $49.95. ISBN

0195166698.

Reviewed by Gerry Beimers

SIL International and University of New England (Australia)

ch 1 “official” statement of his Creole Prototype hypothesis. Here he explicates the three traits of the creole prototype, namely,

1. “few or no inflectional affixes” (p. 12),
2. “little or no use of tone to distinguish monosyllabic lexical items or to encode morphosyntactic distinctions” (p. 13), and
3. a lack of noncompositional derivation.

ch 2: four diagnostics of grammatical complexity, namely,

1. phonemic inventory,
2. more syntactic rules to be processed,
3. grammaticalized expressions of fine-grained semantic and pragmatic distinctions, and
4. inflectional morphology.

ch 3: the developmental relationship between pidgins and creoles. In it he argues against the notion that the path from source language to creole is merely via “syntax-internal” (p. 74) transformation. The argument takes the shape of an examination of six features (which he designates as ornamental—metaphorically speaking) not found in creoles, namely:

1. ergativity,
2. inalienable possessive marking,
3. overt marking of inherent reflexivity,
4. evidential markers,
5. grammaticalized referential marking, and
6. consonant mutation.

ch 5: argues that the superstratist creole genesis model (advanced mainly by Chaudenson and Mufwene) is not supported by the data.

ch 11: English is “significantly less overspecified semantically and less complexified syntactically” (p. 268) compared to its Germanic sisters. His essential thesis, that this is due to a contact-based explanation, accounts for the facts. He outlines his view of overspecification and complexification and then goes on to examine ten features, namely,

1. reflexivity marking,
2. external possessor constructions,
3. grammatical gender marking on the article,
4. derivational morphology,
5. directional adverbs,
6. be with past participles,
7. passive marking with become,
8. verb-second word order,
9. disappearance of thou, and
10. disappearance of the indefinite pronoun man.