Genetic linguistics and genetic creolistics

Mufwene, Salikoko S.

doi:10.1075/jpcl.18.2.07muf

Cited by 38 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…; Ringe et al. 2002: 108; and the related debate in Mufwene 2003; Thomason 2003). As Mufwene (2004: 481) correctly observes:…”

Section: Whence ‘Creole Genesis’?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Acquisition in Creolization and, Thus, Language Change: Some Cartesian‐ Uniformitarian Boundary Conditions

DeGraff¹

2009

Language and Linguist. Compass

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1 Background and Objectives 1.1 Terminological and conceptual preliminaries: 'Creoles', 'Creole genesis', 'Creolization', etc. 1.2 Uniformitarian boundary conditions 1.3 Cartesian boundary conditions 1.4 Some landmarks for navigating through the many detours of this long essay 2 Whence 'Creole Genesis'?2.1 Making constructive use of the distinction and relation between 'I-languages' and 'E-languages' 2.1.1 The ontological priority of I-languages (and innovations therein) 2.1.2 'E-creoles' vs. 'I-creoles' 2.1.3 Findings about E-creoles and I-creoles complement each other 2.1.4 I-languages as 'linguistic fingerprints': no two idiolects are identical 2.1.5 Abrupt 'innovations' precede gradual 'spread' 2.2 Deconstructing 'gradualism' 2.2.1 Gradual 'change' in E-language reduces to abrupt steps in I-languages 2.2.2 Gradualism in acquisition, in creolization and in age-grading effects 2.2.3 The roles of children and adults vis-à-vis innovations and the spread thereof 2.3 On the formation of 'I-creoles' via parameter-(re)setting in I-languages -as in other cases of language change 2.3.1 'Poverty of the stimulus' arguments and 'the logical problem of language acquisition' 2. AbstractThis essay prescribes some broad 'Cartesian-Uniformitarian' boundary conditions for linguistic hypotheses about Creole formation. These conditions make constructive connections between Creole studies, historical linguistics and language-acquisition research. Here 'Cartesian' has a mentalist sense, as in Chomsky (1966): I consider the formation of so-called 'Creole' languages to be ultimately reducible to the creation, in certain sociohistorical contexts, of certain idiolects (i.e., individual internal, or 'I-', languages) in the minds of the 'first "Creole" speakers'. To avoid circularity, my use of the term 'Creole' in the phrase 'first "Creole" speakers' combines some of its original ethno-historical senses: I use the word 'Creole', in this particular context, to refer to the non-indigenous people of African or European descent that were born and raised in the colonial New World, in opposition to those that were born and raised in the Old Worlds of Africa and Europe. The term 'Uniformitarian' evokes Neogrammarian approaches to language change, as advocated, for example, by Osthoff and Brugmann (1878) and Paul (1890). It summarizes my fundamental working assumption that no sui generis or exceptional linguistic processes need to be postulated in order to explain the creation of these languages that have come to be labeled 'Creole': these languages were created by the same psycholinguistic mechanisms that are responsible for the creation of (I-)languages, and for linguistic diachronic patterns, everywhere else. Therefore, 'Creole' languages cannot be distinguished a priori from non-'Creole' languages on any linguistic-theoretical criteria -and 'Creole' languages can be genetically classified by the Comparative Method, on a par with non-'Creole' languages. Such assumptions go against popular claims about Creole genesis such as those ...

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“…; Ringe et al. 2002: 108; and the related debate in Mufwene 2003; Thomason 2003). As Mufwene (2004: 481) correctly observes:…”

Section: Whence ‘Creole Genesis’?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Acquisition in Creolization and, Thus, Language Change: Some Cartesian‐ Uniformitarian Boundary Conditions

DeGraff¹

2009

Language and Linguist. Compass

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“…It has also been claimed that the comparative method cannot apply to creoles in order to determine whether they are genetically related to their "lexifiers" (Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Thomason 2002. The objection to this claim is very simple: it has never been tried and, as pointed out by Chaudenson (1992Chaudenson ( , 2001Mufwene 2003a), the myth is based on mistaken comparisons of creoles' structures with those of the standard varieties of European languages. Creoles may actually reveal the artificiality of the comparative method itself based on "clean" data constituted by written records, which are not representative of the messy, internally variable, spoken vernaculars.…”

Section: 24mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thomason & Kaufman 1988;Thomason 2001Thomason , 2002, despite the contrary sentiments of their speakers, as in the case of Gullah in the United States (Mufwene 1988). To my knowledge, however, the comparative method has never been applied in such cases (Mufwene 2003a). Posner (1985) and Trask (1996) should not be dismissed so casually when they claim that French Creoles and Papiamentu are new dialects of French, in the case of the former group, or new Romance languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population Movements and Contacts in Language Evolution

Mufwene¹

2007

J Lang Contact

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I argue for uniformitarianism (Mufwene 2001) in accounts of language evolution. Below, after dismissing a few myths about the development of creoles, I show how what we have learned to date about this case of language speciation prompts genetic linguists to reopen the books about language diversification in general and as a concomitant of language death in many cases. I adduce various examples from distant and recent histories to illustrate how population movements and contacts have been a critical ecological factor even in the cases of so-called "internally-motivated" change. The distinction between "internally" and "externally-motivated" language change boils down to a mere sociological contrast once contact is situated at the inter-idiolectal level, where interactions and negotiations between linguistic systems take place, regardless of whether or not xenolectal features participate in the feature pool. Ultimately, the same mechanisms of competition and selection that apply to linguistic features also apply to languages and dialects. Driven by the ecology of language use, the mechanisms roll the dice not only on how a particular language evolves under specific ecological conditions but also on the vitality of languages.

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“…Both are consequences of the appropriation of a language by a different population of speakers, who restructured it partly under the influence of their substrate languages, although, with a couple of exceptions, Romanists appear to have generally dodged the role of substrate influence in the emergence of the Romance languages. 1 A different genetic-affiliation conclusion smacks of double standards, as I argue in Mufwene (2001Mufwene ( , 2003Mufwene ( , 2008.…”

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confidence: 99%