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213 Pages·1995·6.08 MB·English
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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-

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