Abstract
This article responds to Ingo Plag’s recent (2008) columns in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages in which creoles are discussed as ‘conventionalized interlanguages of an early stage’ with consideration of inflectional morphology and syntax. Here it is argued that Plag’s traditional conception of transfer coupled with his uncritical acceptance of Pienemann’s (1998, 2005) Processability Theory as a theory of interlanguage development make it difficult to offer a rigorous assessment of the basic claim. This article offers several critiques of Plag’s argumentation and claims that Schwartz & Sprouse’s (1996) Full Transfer/Full Access model offers accounts that are at least as satisfactory as those offered by Processability Theory. Nevertheless, while embracing Plag’s Interlanguage Hypothesis, this article calls for quantitatively and qualitatively more ambitious studies of both interlanguage development and creole formation, based on typologically driven constellations of L1s/substrates and the Target Languages/lexifiers.
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