Creole Languages and Language Acquisition

213 Pages·1995·6.08 MB·English

by  Herman Wekker

Creole Languages and Language Acquisition
W
DE
G
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 86
Editor
Werner Winter
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Creole Languages and
Language Acquisition
edited by
Herman Wekker
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 1996
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Creole languages and language acquisition / edited by Her-
man Wekker.
p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and mono-
graphs ; 86).
Papers presented at a conference held Dec. 1990. Uni-
versity of Leiden.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 3-11-014386-0
1. Creole dialects-Acquisition-Congresses. 2. Lan-
guage acquisition—Congresses. I. Series.
PM7831.C73 1996
417'.22-dc20 95-43116
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Creole languages and language acquisition / ed. by Herman Wek-
ker. - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1996
(Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 86)
ISBN 3-11-014386-0
NE: Wekker, Herman [Hrsg.]; Trends in linguistics / Studies
and monographs
© Copyright 1995 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan-
ical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, with-
out permission in writing from the publisher.
Typesetting and Printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin.
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.
Contents
Introduction: Creole languages and language acquisition
Herman Wekker
Part I: Creolization as first-language acquisition
Small steps or large leaps? Undergeneralization and
overgeneralization in Creole acquisition
Jean Aitchison
Creoles and the bankruptcy of current acquisition theory
Derek Bickerton
Comment on Bickerton's paper
Thomas Roeper
Ambient language and learner output in a Creole environment
Lawrence D. Carrington
Creole languages and parameter setting: A case study using
Haitian Creole and the pro-drop parameter
Michel F. DeGraff
Part II: Creolization as second-language acquisition
Does creologeny really recapitulate ontogeny?
Mervyn C. Alleyne
The making of a language from a lexical point of view
Geert Koefoed — Jacqueline Tarenskeen
Creolization and the acquisition of English as a second language
Herman Wekker
vi Contents
Part III: Creolization as relexiflcation
The functional category "agreement" and Creole genesis
Claire Lefebvre
On the acquisition of nominal structures in the genesis of
Haitian Creole
John S. Lumsden
Introduction:
Creole languages and language acquisition
Herman Wekker
As John Lumsden writes at the beginning of his contribution to this vol-
ume, creole languages are natural languages, and hence
the study of creole grammars must be a particular instance of the study of
the grammar of natural languages in general. That is, Creoles must be the
product of the same cognitive faculties which produce any other natural
language. Therefore, a synchronic study of a creole language in itself has
no properties which distinguish it from studies of non-creole languages.
But Creoles do differ from other natural languages in their historical
evolution. Where most languages evolve slowly, responding mainly to pres-
sures which are interior to a largely unilingual population group, Creoles
are the result of the social confrontation of several languages and the gene-
sis of a creole language is relatively abrupt. Creoles differ massively from
any single one of the source languages which contribute to their origin and,
moreover, they develop these differences in a relatively brief period and in
a particular social context.
This means that comparing creole grammars with the grammars of the
source languages to which they are historically related has a great deal of
special interest. Creole languages offer the possibility of observing rapid
linguistic change under rather unusual circumstances.
The present volume contains a selection of the papers presented at
an international three-day workshop on creole languages and language
acquisition, held at the University of Leiden in December 1990. The
Leiden Creole Workshop (organized with the assistance of Pieter Muy-
sken) formed part of a research project at NIAS (the Netherlands Insti-
tute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences) in the
year 1990/1991. The NIAS project was entitled "The logical problem of
language acquisition", and set out to investigate the acquisition of parts
of the grammar in children and adults. The coordinators of the project
were Teun Hoekstra and Harry van der Hulst (both of the Linguistics
Department of the University of Leiden). The project group also included
Toni Borowsky, Ger de Haan, Allan James, Peter Jordens, Charlotte
Köster, David Lebeaux, Rita Manzini, Ann Mills, Tom Roeper, and my-
self. I thank all of them for helpful discussions, and for making our NIAS
2 Herman Wekker
year such a memorable experience. I am also grateful to the director and
staff of NIAS for providing the right atmosphere to do scholarly work.
The purpose of the Leiden Creole Workshop was to bring together
linguists from three fields: 1) the theory of language acquistion, 2) pidgin
and creole studies, and 3) the acquisition of Creole languages. The central
issue discussed during the workshop was whether the specific circum-
stances of the genesis of creole languages might have implications for our
view of language acquisition in general. Conversely, it was argued, the
theory of language acquisition could throw new light on the genesis of
existing creole languages.
It turned out that there are numerous questions that creolists, histori-
cal linguists and acquisition researchers share with one another. For ex-
ample, if creole grammars resemble child grammars in certain respects,
due to the genetic programming of natural languages, then how does
creole language development proceed? The central issue is: to what extent
is acquisition input-driven, and to what extent is it programmed by innate
(universal) mechanisms, given that the child's language environment is
far from homogeneous? A related issue is how language development
takes place in contemporary creole-speaking communities, where the am-
bient language is often very heterogeneous, involving complex layers of
linguistic systems. Problems of this kind are addressed by Adone, Aitchi-
son, Bickerton, Carrington, and DeGraff in section 1 of this volume.
Another question is to what extent the process of creolization is analogous
to second- rather than to first-language acquisition, or whether it is a combi-
nation of the two. If creolization is a case of second-language acquisition,
then the process takes place gradually and involves the systematic expansion
of the jargons of adult learners. This topic is dealt with by Alleyne,
Koefoed-Tarenskeen, and Wekker in section 2 of this volume.
Other researchers agree that creolization is a function of second-lan-
guage acquisition but claim that relexification, while probably playing a
role as a mental process in all cases of second-language acquisition, has
a central role in creolization due to the particular social circumstances
under which Creoles are created. The topic of relexification is discussed
by Lefebvre and by Lumsden in section 3 of this volume.
The three sections are entitled: 1) Creolization as first-language
acquisition, 2) Creolization as second-language acquisition, and 3) Creo-
lization as relexification. The volume contains ten papers.
Part I consists of three papers.
Aitchison's paper deals with the question whether language acquisition
and creolization proceed via small steps, involving undergeneralization,
Introduction 3
or in large leaps, involving overgeneralization. The question is explored
with particular reference to the treatment of the so-called "predicate
marker" i in Tok Pisin by a group of first-generation creole speakers. Her
general conclusion is that the use of i is declining, and that the process of
atrophy is complex, showing both overgeneralization and undergeneral-
ization. The various syntactic environments in which i occurs are treated
differently: in one, overgeneralization is found, where a construction as-
sociated originally with i is being extended. In two others, undergeneral-
ization is found, in which i is becoming increasingly linked to particular
lexical items. In any case, the process does not seem to be instantaneous,
and is still incomplete.
Bickerton, in a paper entitled "Creoles and the bankruptcy of current
acquisition theory", claims that the very existence of creole languages
poses a challenge to acquisition theory. He discusses the case of Hawaiian
Creole, where the pidginized input that gave rise to the creole was radi-
cally ill-formed in at least three ways: a) it was structurally restricted
(containing no sentences that could be unambiguously analyzed as con-
taining embedded clauses); b) it was radically variable (containing ele-
ments from more than one language and little or no structural consis-
tency); and c) it was morphologically impoverished (in particular, it
lacked inflections as well as determiners, prepositions, complementizers
and verbal auxiliaries). He notes Hawaiian Creole is a natural language
which is somehow connected with, yet goes far beyond, the pidgin data
he surveys; he shows how a complete (and quite complex) rule system
could arise from a pidgin in which there was complete anarchy.
In his "Comment on Bickerton's paper", Roeper argues that there is
very little that is different in Bickerton's approach to the assumptions
made by researchers in first-language acquisition: a) Universal Grammar
is innate, b) particular grammars are fixed by input, and c) children's
utterances reflect both the impact of input and spontaneous, unmodelled,
projections from unmarked aspects of Universal Grammar. In Roeper's
view, creole languages are no different.
In his paper "Ambient language and learner output in a creole environ-
ment", Carrington stresses the importance of creating a corpus produced
in the learning environment by the learner as well as the participants in
his/her language socialization. There are two reasons for this: first, exist-
ing descriptions do not allow the analyst to have a clear idea of the
learner's target, and second, our knowledge of variation suggests that,
within the Caribbean sociolinguistic setting, it is difficult to predict the
mix of features that will constitute the input to a learner. He uses Carib-