Do Creoles conform to typological patterns? Habitual marking in Palenquero

Abstract

It is widely debated whether creole languages form a typological class; however, crosslinguistic generalizations from functional typology are seldom tested in creoles. Typological studies report a strong crosslinguistic tendency for asymmetries in habitual grammatical expressions across the present and past temporal reference domains (Bybee, 1994:245–8; Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994:151–60). This study analyzes two linguistic variants, preverbal asé and zero, which compete for habitual marking in Palenquero Creole (Colombia). I ask here: To what degree does the linguistic patterning of these forms conform to the crosslinguistic tendency? Results show that, despite Palenquero having widely cited creole features (e.g., preverbal markers and bare verb stems), the asymmetrical expression, distribution, and relative ordering of forms in the variable contexts closely align with crosslinguistic predictions for habituals, thus giving convincing evidence of typological markedness and not a Creole Prototype.

Mouthing constructions in 37 signed languages: typology, ecology and ideology

“…The relationship between social and linguistic properties is central to study of language contact, particularly creoles. This can be seen in ecological approaches like feature pools (Mufwene 2001) and in proposals for and against creoles forming a typological group (McWhorter 1998;Mufwene 2000;DeGraff 2005;Bakker et al 2011;Aboh 2016;Szeto, Lai & Ansaldo 2019;Baptista 2020;Smith 2021). Critical to these discussions is language documentation, which entails discussion of what forms are considered to belong to a particular language.…”

Do Creoles conform to typological patterns? Habitual marking in Palenquero—Erratum

“…In the original publication of this article (Smith, 2021), a production error caused some of the Examples to be misnumbered. The correct numbering is as follows: The two examples given on the eighth page of the article are examples (4) and (5). The examples given on the ninth page of the article are, in order, examples (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), and (11). …”