Creoles as interlanguages

Abstract

The idea that processes of second language acquisition (SLA) are highly relevant for an account of creole genesis is far from new or original (see Plag (2008a) for some discussion and further references). However, it is still controversial which kinds of interlanguage processes are relevant, and how much of a given creole’s structures can be attributed to such processes. In my previous two Columns (Plag 2008a,b) I discussed a specific hypothesis about the relation of creolization and SLA that I labeled ’interlanguage hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, creoles originate as conventionalized interlanguages of an early developmental stage. The interlanguage hypothesis is highly compatible with scenarios that claim that creolization is at least a two-generation process, which involves at least two successive stages of development. For example, Veenstra (2003) argues that during the first stage, adults acquire the superstrate language to variable degrees, with interlanguages of the Basic Variety type (Perdue 1993) chiefly among them. Traditionally, this stage has also been called the pidginization stage, characterized by rudimentary acquisition of the dominant language. This stage is followed by a second stage, following the so-called target-shift, in which the next generation of speakers acquires the new medium of interethnic communication (cf., e.g., Baker 1994), and no longer the superstrate language. At this stage, processes of SLA, first language acquisition and dialect levelling may all be going on at the same time. In my previous column, I took a closer look at inflectional morphology and a number of syntactic constructions to investigate whether the linguistic phenomena encountered in these areas lend themselves to an explanation in terms of SLA processes. Starting out with the assumptions of a psycholingistic theory of morphosyntactic development in SLA (Processability Theory, e.g. Pienemann 1998, 2005) I argued that both the loss of inflectional morphology and the preservation (if any) of primarily inherent inflection can be