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"Morphology and Word Order in 'Creolization' and Beyond"

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chapter 8 .................................................................................................................................. MORPHOLOGY AND WORD ORDER IN “CREOLIZATION” AND BEYOND .................................................................................................................................. michel degraff 1 Prologue ................................................................................................................................................................... An introduction to “Creole” morphosyntax would be incomplete without a so- ciohistorically based discussion of the term Creole and its implications for comparative-historical linguistics. This essay thus starts with a brief and prelim- inary critique, in section 2, of certain foundational assumptions in Creole studies.1 Then I provide a theoretically grounded overview of a selected subset of VP- related properties in Haitian Creole (HC)—a bona fide Creole, on the sociohis- torical grounds outlined in section 2. Section 3 introduces the basic comparative data related to verb and object placement in HC and some of its major source languages. Section 4 contemplates the theoretical implications of verb-placement contrasts between HC and its European ancestor, French—the principal etymo- logical source of the HC lexicon. Section 5 extends this discussion to the mor- phosyntax of object pronouns. (The basic data and observations in section 3–5 294 the oxford handbook of comparative syntax are taken mostly from DeGraff 1994a, 1994b, 1997, 2000. In fact, this chapter is the payoff of long overdue promissory notes; see DeGraff 1997: 90 n42, 91 n51.) Section 6 enlarges the discussion to include relevant patterns in Germanic and French diachrony and to inquire about the (“abnormal”?) theoretical status of creole exceptionalism—the long-posited opposition between “abnormal” “nongenetic” transmission in Creole genesis, supposedly with “significant discrep- ancies,” and “normal”/“genetic” transmission in “regular” language change, whereby a language is “passed down from one speaker generation to the next with changes spread more or less evenly across all parts of the language” (see, e.g., Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 8–12, 206, 211, etc.). Section 7 ends the chapter by considering the consequences of the theoretical discussion in sections 3–6 vis-a`-vis Creole Exceptionalism. In this section I also compare the Haitian Creole data with germane data from a couple of other Romance-lexifier Creoles: namely, Cape Verdean Creole (lexifier: Portuguese) and Palenquero Creole (lexifier: Spanish). This preliminary comparison suggests that, even within a small sample of Romance-lexified Creoles, there is no structural “Creole” uniformity in the VP and its extended projections. More generally, there is no distinct and uniform “Creole” typology. My overall conclusion is that, from a Cartesian and Uniformitarian (e.g., a Universal Grammar [UG] based and mentalist) perspective, Creole genesis ulti- mately, and unsurprisingly, reduces to the same of sort of mental processes that underlie the diachrony of non-Creole languages. 2 Some Histori(ographi)cal Background on Creoles and Creole Studies ................................................................................................................................................................... 2.1 Sociohistorical and Epistemological Assumptions Creole Exceptionalism—the dogma that Creole languages constitute an excep- tional class on either genealogical or typological grounds or both—is a corollary of the twin (neo-)colonial history of Creole speakers and Creole studies (see DeGraff 2001a: 90–105; 2002a). The languages we call “Creoles” (e.g., Caribbean Creoles) do share well- documented commonalities across sociohistorical profiles (e.g., history of large- scale language contact) and across structural tendencies (e.g., reduction of inflec- morphology and word order in “creolization” 295 tional paradigms). These commonalities seem uncontroversial, even if these sociohistorical and structural tendencies are also found among other products of language evolution that are not usually labeled “Creole.” What is more controversial is the claim that, across time and across space, Creole languages can be defined as a typologically distinct language grouping whose exceptional diachrony makes them cluster around an exceptional structural “prototype” (see the critiques in, e.g., Givo´n 1979; Mufwene 1986, 2001; Muysken 1988, and the references in note 1). Such exceptionalist stereotypes have a long history in linguistics—see, for example, the Creole morphological profiles pos- tulated by Jespersen (1922: 233), Hjelmslev (1938), Bickerton (1988: 276), Seuren and Wekker (1986), McWhorter (1998), and Seuren (1998: 292–293). Notwith- standing their long-standing popularity, these stereotypes for Creole morphology have now been shown to be empirically, theoretically, and sociologically problem- atic. For my purposes in this chapter, I assume that a valid “Creole” grouping can be reasonably defined on sociohistorical grounds (cf. Mufwene 1986, 2001), not necessarily on genetic, typological, or topological grounds. I thus use “Creole” as an atheoretical ostensive label to point to certain linguistic varieties that are typ- ically perceived as having “abruptly” emerged out of massive language contact as restructured versions of some (erstwhile) “target” language. (I have more to say later in this essay about the terms in quotes.) The most celebrated examples are in the Caribbean, where Creole languages emerged in the seventeenth to nine- teenth centuries, as one linguistic side effect of colonization and slave trade by the British, the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the Spaniards. It is thus that the Caribbean has long been known for its history of population contact, and therefore language contact. Prototypical examples of Creole languages usually include the popular vernaculars spoken in the (greater) Caribbean area: Haitian Creole, Jamaican Creole, Papiamentu, Saramaccan, Sranan, and so on. From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward, the basic ingredients of Europe’s imperialist projects in the Caribbean came to typically include the following sociolinguistically relevant factors: 1. Initial contact between Europeans and Africans in and around the slave ports of Africa 2. The enslavement of increasing numbers of Africans and their subsequent dislocation to the “New World” 3. More and more Africans would become exposed to European languages or to approximations thereof by second-language learners with various (European and African) native languages2 4. Small homestead settler communities with relatively few slaves, in the early Caribbean colonial stages 5. The gradual and partial replacement, in economically successful colonies 296 the oxford handbook of comparative syntax such as Saint-Domingue (i.e., preindependence Haiti), of the original settler communities by large-scale and brutally inegalitarian slave-based plantation economies with a vast majority of Africans and their locally born descendants. The increased reliance on regimented slave labor for economic expansion would, over time, reduce the ratio of Europeans to non-Europeans, with the two groups becoming more and more segregated, especially at the opposite poles of the power hierarchy and especially so on labor-intensive plantations (e.g., large sugar plantations) like those in Saint-Domingue. This social transformation would, in turn, lead to a complex array of language-contact and language- acquisition settings, with a complex array of linguistic varieties as outputs: a con- tinuum of more or less restructured approximations of European languages with varying amounts of substratum effects and structural innovations. Throughout the colonial period, there existed “middle populations”—“middle” in terms of class, civil status, or race—with relatively close contact with both ends of the continuum. These intermediary populations included the mixed-race (the mu- lattoes) and the free people of color (the affranchis). The Mulattoes were locally born (i.e., “Creole”),3 and so were many of the Affranchis. These middle populations, specially the Creoles, would play a key stabilizing role in Creole language formation. This is an oversimplified sketch of the extraordinarily com- plex sociohistorical matrix of Creole genesis (for details, see, e.g., Alleyne 1971; Chaudenson 1992; Chaudenson and Mufwene 2001; Singler 1996; Mufwene 1996, 2001; DeGraff 2002b, 2002c; and the many references therein). No matter the complexity of, and the horrors inherent in, the sociohistory of Caribbean Creole genesis, it can still be assumed, in Cartesian-Uniformitarian fashion, that native Creole speakers, like native speakers of every other language, have always conformed to UG. Notwithstanding the inhumanity of slavery, the slaves and their descendants were still human. I thus assume, against Creole Ex- ceptionalism, that the cognitive resources and strategies enlisted by language ac- quirers during Creole genesis are not fundamentally different from their analogues in friendlier and better documented cases of language change and creation. Like with any other language acquirers, the cognitive task facing native speakers of (the incipient) Creole languages represents yet another instance of the “poverty of stimulus” paradox, also known as “Plato’s Problem” (Chomsky 1986): How does the mind/brain of the language acquirer come to possess complex and ab- stract linguistic properties
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