Somewhere and somehow, in the 5 to 7 million years since the last common ancestors of humans and the great apes, our ancestors “got” language. The authors of this volume all agree that there was no single mutation or cultural innovation that took our ancestors directly from a limited system of a… read more
With English and Portuguese as parent languages; the significant lexical retention of African languages; and the relative isolation of its speakers, Saramaccan has always stood out among Creole languages. Yet despite its obvious interest Saramaccan received little in the way of scholarly study.… read more
Recently claims that the universalist approach to creole languages treats them as “exceptional” are misconceived. The only thing “exceptional” about creoles is the sociohistorical context within which creoles originated. Creoles utilize the same processes that are deployed during “normal” language… read more
In dealing with the nature of protolanguage, an important formative factor in its development, and one that would surely have influenced that nature, has too often been neglected: the precise circumstances under which protolanguage arose. Three factors are involved in this neglect: a failure to… read more
In dealing with the nature of protolanguage, an important formative factor in its development, and one that would surely have influenced that nature, has too often been neglected: the precise circumstances under which protolanguage arose. Three factors are involved in this neglect: a failure to… read more
Afrogenesis is taken here to mean the belief that the English-based Atlantic creole languages originated on the West Coast of Africa. This paper shows that Afrogenesis, originally proposed in work by Hancock and by Smith, and now given a new lease on life by McWhorter, is at best highly dubious.… read more
Two recent works by Carden & Stewart (1988) and Arends (1989) have tried to prove a gradual rather than a single-generational origin for Haitian and Sranan respectively. Both arguments, however, are severely flawed. The Carden-Stewart argument from Haitian reflexivization is shown to depend on… read more
Hitherto it has been believed that serial verb constructions were not found in the French Creoles of the Indian Ocean. In fact, there exists a wide variety of such constructions in both Morisyen and Seselwa; extensive examples from Seselwa are provided. However, for less basilectal speakers, such… read more
