Pidgin Creole Studies

Pidgin and Creole Studies
Author(s): Derek Bickerton

Source: Annual Review of Anthropology , 1976, Vol. 5 (1976), pp. 169-193
Published by: Annual Reviews
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2949309
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Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1976. 5:169-93
Copyright C 1976 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
PIDGIN AND CREOLE STUDIES * 9575
Derek Bickerton
Department of Linguistics, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822
INTRODUCTION
Since pidgin and creole languages have not previously been surveyed in this
review series (nor, save as a sub-subdepartment of linguistics, in its biennial
predecessor), it may be appropriate to begin by very briefly summarizing the
history and development of the field before proceeding to discuss the work that
is currently taking place therein.
Until relatively recently, pidgin and creole languages were regarded, even by
most linguists, as constituting objects hardly worthy of attention from serious
students of language. Despite the fact that attempts to describe such languages
date back at least to the second half of the eighteenth century (90), and that a few
nineteenth-century linguists, in particular Schuchardt (115), had observed their
possible relevance to any general theory of linguistic change, the popular view
that they constituted merely "corrupted" versions of European languages was
widely accepted. As a result, development of the field was delayed, and when it
came was very uneven. According to a survey by Hancock in the Hymes
collection (72), there exist at present over 200 pidgin and creole languages (59),
but of these, only about six could be said to have acquired an extensive literature
(Haitian Creole, Sranan, Papiamentu, Jamaican Creole, Hawaiian Pidgin-Cre-
ole, and Neo-Melanesian or Tokpisin), while many are known only through
anecdotal reference and have never been described at all. Similarly, there has
never been complete agreement even on the precise boundaries of the field.
Although the definitions of Hall (57)-that a pidgin is a language with "sharply
reduced" grammatical structure and vocabulary, native to none of its users,
while a creole is a pidgin that has acquired native speakers-would probably still
be accepted by a majority of linguists, we will find that more recently some
linguists have tried to narrow the first definition and others to broaden the
second, while still others, adopting what has been called the "domestic" theory
of creole origins, have attempted to short-circuit Hall's cycle.
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, early interest in pidgins and creoles
centered around their origins and the extent to which-at a time when the
Stammbaum theory of genetic relationships wa5 ascendant-they might p
counterexamples to such a theory. Adherents of the theory claimed, for in-
169

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170 BICKERTON
stance, that there could be no such thing as a "mixed language," and yet pidgins
and creoles seemed to show signs of precisely such a mixture; although, in the
case of at least the best-known examples, vocabulary was preponderantly
(+90%) drawn from the Indo-European parent, the syntax seemed to contain a
number of non-IE features. Was it the case that [as Sylvain (127) argued for
Haitian Creole] a creole language was simply the grafting of a European lexicon
on an African grammar? Or did the European component outweigh all others
on every linguistic level? While a number of writers (66, 128-130, 140) argued
for at least a modified version of the former position, the majority (41, 55-57,
75, 149) continued to maintain the latter view. This was hardly surprising, since
both the tradition of Indo-European philology and the currently (i.e. prior to
1960) dominant school of structural linguistics both regarded phonology and
morphology as central to the study of language and syntax as relatively
peripheral.
However, the nature of the genetic debate was radically changed by the
introduction in the 1960s of a tertiumn quid in the form of the monogenetic
hypothesis (122, 132, 150). According to this hypothesis, the similarities found
worldwide among pidgins and creoles were the result of their having had a
common ancestor, perhaps dating back as far as the medieval Lingua Franca
(150), but certainly to an Afro-Portuguese pidgin that is assumed to have
developed in fifteenth-century Guinea. Monogenesis, which for all its apparent
heterodoxy represents a means of saving many of the assumptions of traditional
historical linguistics, entails a belief in relexification (122), the replacement of a
vocabulary originally Portuguese by English, French, Spanish, or Dutch words,
without any effect on other areas of the grammar.
For reasons which remain mysterious to this reviewer, this volume's prede-
cessor, The Biennial Reviewv of Aithropology (1959-1971) consistently listed
works dealing with pidgins and creoles in the section on "Sociolinguistics,"
despite the fact that very little work in the field could properly be called
sociolinguistic; an article by Alleyne on language and Jamaican politics (4), a
curious essay by Fanon that surprisingly endorses educated French attitudes to
pidgins and creoles (42), and an entertaining if rather impressionistic dissertation
by Reisman on the ethnography of speaking in Antigua (107) are three of the very
few pre-1970 examples that spring to mind. For the most part, when it did not
seek to delve into origins, work on pidgins and creoles was purely descriptixo,
and in general, prestructuralist (e.g. 41, 89), early structuralist (25, 37, 54), or
tagmemic (95) in orientation; only one study, B. Bailey's (6) analysis of the
syntax of Jamaican creole, was within the framework of generative grammar.
However, during the last few years, several aspects of this picture have
changed, and there has been a considerable rebirth of interest in pidgins and
creoles as possible testing grounds for issues in contemporary theory. Three
developments in general linguistics have helped to foster this interest. First, the
revival of historical linguistics, under generative auspices, created a climate
favorable to the study of the processes of linguistic change. Second, the study of
linguistic variation, long considered minor or irrelevant by most linguists, be-
came a legitimate and even respectable field. Third, and perhaps most important

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PIDGIN AND CREOLE STUDIES 171
for future studies, the view that languages are illimitably different was
replaced by the view that all languages are fundamentally similar, and this
stimulated the search for universals of language.
In consequence, the last 5 years have seen a sharp increase both in the number
of writings on pidgins and creoles and the range of topics that such writings have
covered. Although many of these topics overlap, the lack of any single clear
direction in the field makes it necessary, for purposes of review, to subdivide the
material according to the major centers of interest.
DEFINITIONS
A recurring problem in the field has been the precise definition of

As numerous writers have pointed out, pidgins and creoles hav
been defined in extralinguistic terms, so that (in contrast with the
not possible to establish the allegiance of any given language sim
at its sound system, grammatical structure, and lexicon, and th
these with those of putatively related languages. At the Intern
ence on Pidginization and Creolization (Jamaica, 1968) a rather f
ing was spent discussing "simplification" as a possible formal c
pidginization, but "simplification" itself proved quite impossib
practice, extralinguistic definitions have been altered and refin
Hall's acceptance, as a pidgin, of any improvised contact language between
persons not sharing a common tongue has been challenged by Whinnom (151);
according to the latter's view, contact languages produced by a meeting of only
two language communities (like the hapa-haole of nineteenth century Hawaii, or
the Italo-Spanish cocoliche of Buenos Aires) represent phenomena too transi-
tory and unstable to be classed as distinct languages. The term "pidgin" would
be reserved by Whinnom for situations where a reduced or simplified form of Li
was used mainly by native speakers of L2, L3, L4, etc to communicate with one
another, rather than with speakers of Li, thus freeing their speech from being
corrected in the direction of Li and enabling it to develop as an independent
entity. This view, which would sharply reduce the importance in pidginization of
any deliberate simplification by Li speakers (contrary to the views expressed in
19, 44, 96, etc), would probably now be shared by a majority of pidginists.
Another distinction which is sometimes attempted is that between "trade
jargons" and pidgins proper (9, 134). It is not clear that such a distinction is
meaningful or can be consistently maintained. It appears to be motivated at least
in part by a recognition that some pidgins are relatively rudimentary and highly
unstable, whereas others are more developed and have relatively homogeneous
grammars. But it is not clear that there is any necessary correlation between the
pidgin's function and its linguistic status. Hawaiian pidgin, which was certainly
not a "trade jargon," and indeed gave birth to a creole, never achieved gram-
matical complexity or stability. It would rather seem that all contact languages,
whatever their primary function, develop through a series of stages; trade
jargons may be likelier to be trapped in the more primitive stages than other
types of pidgin, but there is no other obvious typological difference.

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172 BICKERTON
If the trend in pidgin studies has been to limit the area of application of the
term "pidgin," creole studies have shown precisely the reverse tendency.
Studies by Goodman (51) and Southworth (119) served to raise the possibility
that pidginization or creolization might have intervened at some stage in the
historical development of a given language, even where no historical evidence
for such processes has survived. While the cases they present-those of Mbugu
and Marathi respectively-seem fairly plausible, there is obviously a danger that
any unusual historical change may be "explained" in these terms. Indeed, C. J.
Bailey (7, p. 134) has come perilously close to equating creolization with lin-
guistic change in general:
I am taking it for granted that mixtures of systems spoken by native speakers-i.e.
creoles-may occur in different proportions and degrees.... Let scientists borrow
pairwise from German . . . and let wtise become a productive formative in ordinary
speech for deriving adverbs from nouns, and this is creolization!
Admittedly, he goes on to state that "one would not wish to speak of creolization
where only a few lexical items were borrowed," but the supposition that creoles
are simply any "mixed languages" leads logically to such a position, which in
effect makes "creolization" a redundant term.
A Baileyan view of creolization would, of course, remove creoles from any
necessary connection with antecedent pidgins; and, indeed, from three other
sources have come suggestions that creoles, properly so described, may exist
without any prior process of pidginization. The first was a paper by Gumperz &
Wilson (53), which showed how Marathi, Kannada, and Urdu, as spoken in the
Indian village of Kupwar, had undergone so much convergence as to virtually
share a common surface syntax, even though the standard forms of these
languages show many syntactic differences. It was claimed that such conver-
gence, based on close contact over an extended period, yielded phenomena
closely similar to those which characterized creolization, and should therefore
be regarded as special cases of the latter. The second was the suggestion,
implicit in Valkoff's work on Portuguese creoles (144), but made more explicit
by Tonkin (135) and Hancock (61), that pidgins themselves may have had a
creole origin. According to this theory, the most likely locus for the origin of any
contact language on the West Coast of Africa lay not in the necessarily fleeting
contacts of traders (in which, as some historical evidence attests, interpreters
and even phrase-books were often used) but in the families of lhin((dos, those
Europeans (Portuguese in the first instance, later of other nationalities) who
settled in Guinea and married into various tribal societies. Languages thus
developed, it is argued, subsequently became contact languages throughout
West Africa, and were the ancestors of Caribbean and other creoles. The third
source is a note by Voorhoeve (145) which pointed out a consequence of the
monogenetic theory that apparently had not been realized before: that "if the
theory of relexification holds true, a historical Portuguese pidgin has been
relexified in contact with French masters, without passing through an inter-
mediate French pidgin stage." Thus acceptance of monogenesis virtually
abolishes pidginization as a productive process; one is forced to assume a single

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invariant pidgin being transmitted from speaker to speaker just like any other
language.
With respect to all of these definitional proposals, the most one can say is that
they show how much we still have to learn about linguistic change processes,
language transmission, and the various kinds of language-contact situations.
Unfortunately, the questions they raise, though of considerable importance, are
far from easy to answer. Many of the types of situation which gave rise to creole
or creole-like phenomena in the past may not be replicated in the twentieth
century; those that produced the European-based creoles-episodes of Western
imperialist expansion-are unlikely ever to be repeated, at least in a similar
form. Thus these questions are unlikely to be resolved by empirical study, while
the only other possible source of solutions, historical reconstruction, is made
extremely difficult by the virtual absence of recorded texts.
At the same time, there is a clear danger that a broadened definition of creoles
may simply serve to distract attention from what have been traditionally known
as creoles, i.e. the offspring of pidgin languages. As I shall show in a later
section, there may be reason to believe that these represent differences in kind,
rather than in degree, from other kinds of language change, whether contact-
generated or internal. If creolization is redefined as no more than massive
linguistic change due to interlingual contact, then these differences may be
glossed over, and a potential source of valuable insights into the basic structure
of language may be lost.
ORIGINS
As mentioned earlier in this review, the debate about origins has occupied much
of the history of pidgin and creole studies. Though the monogenetic case was
widely accepted in the late 1960s (cf DeCamp 29), this was due more to a
prolonged stalemate between previous competing views than to any massive
display of supporting evidence. Alleyne (5) pointed out in 1971 that no one had
so far attempted to reconstruct the hypothesized Proto-Pidgin, and this lack still
has not been remedied. A paper by Voorhoeve (146) which seeks to prove
relexification in the case of two of the three Surinam creoles-Sranan and
Saramaccan-represents almost the only recent substantive argument in favor
of the monogeneticist position, and even this is not a new argument, but rather a
gathering of fresh evidence in support of an old one. Indeed, the view that
pidgins and creoles are predominantly simplifications of their respective super-
strates has enjoyed a mild revival (21, 68, 96, 97, 143). Work along these lines has
produced some new evidence, mainly historical, which serves directly or indi-
rectly to suggest that deliberate simplification by superstrate speakers may
indeed have existed during early pidginization. However, such work continues
to ignore, downplay, or distort both the number of creole rules which are
demonstrably nonsuperstratal in origin, and the widespread typological sim-
ilarities between creoles of different genetic affiliation which formed the lynch-
pin of the monogeneticist case. Thus it is typical of the "simplificationist"
school of thought that it concentrates on superficial morphology rather than

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174 BICKERTON
underlying semantics. Such writers on French creoles as Valdman (143) and

Chaudenson (21), for instance, are quite content to repeat the traditional deriv-
ations of creole tense-aspect markers from French periphrastic constructions,
without taking into account that the meanings of the creole forms by no means
always match those of the periphrastic forms, though the semantic structure of
French creole tense-aspect systems does match those of at least some non-
Frernch creoles, and these systemic similarities owe nothing to French or any
other European language.
What has vitiated the origins debate has been an insistence on premature
position-taking. For every ten studies that have determined, on the basis of often
superficial, partial, and unsystematic evidence, that a given creole un-
questionably belonged to one family or another, we have been lucky to get one
which eschewed partisan stances and got down to the business of comparison in
workmanlike fashion. One of the few pre-1970 examples of the latter genre is
Goodman's comparative study of French creoles (50). Subsequently there have
been studies by Hancock (60) and Alleyne (still unpublished) of the relationships
between the English-based Atlantic pidgins and creoles, but no comparable
work on Portuguese creoles apart from a somewhat sketchy and anecdotal
treatment by Valkoff (144) and a brief article by Ferraz on the Bight of Benin
creoles (45); a comparative study of these four creoles (Sao Thome, Angolar,
Principe, and Annob6n) with the Crioulo of Guinea, Cape Verde creole, Pa-
piamento, and Papia Kristang would seem to be essential, not merely in its own
right, but for the light it might shed on the contention that a Portuguese-based
pidgin was the progenitor of all the European-based creoles.
Another largely unfilled need is that for comparisons between pidgin or creole
languages and related non-European languages. Most studies in this area con-
centrate on some fairly isolated segment of the grammar such as serial verbs
(e.g. 11, 71, 147, 152), while studies which attempt to embrace a wide variety of
grammatical phenomena, such as Camden's comparison of South Santo with
New Hebrides Bislama (20), are all too rare. However, two novel forms of
comparative analysis deserve mention. The first, by Huttar (70), involves taking
a list of polysemic root morphemes in a given creole (in this case, Djuka) and
determining the extent to which their range of meanings is shared by both
putatively related and unrelated languages; for instance, whether, as in Djuka,
the morpheme that means "mouth" is also used to refer to arrowheads and other
pointed objects. The results (which Huttar admits are tentative and need
confirmation from other sources) seem clearly to disconfirm the predictions of
monogenesis-creoles with no African substratum scored lower on similarity
than many unrelated indigenous languages-and were hardly more favorable to
those of any "universals" theory. Pidgins and creoles, as a class, scored only
marginally higher than a wide sample of indigenous and in the main unrelated
languages. Huttar found that the major semantic influence, at least at this lexical
level, came from the substratum: creole languages with an African substratum
and some (by no means all) West African languages showed the highest level of
similarity. The second, by Lee & Vaughn-Cooke (83). compared Nigerian

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pidgin to English and a group of substratal languages on the basis of Chomsky-

Hallean feature marking. If a pidgin were really "simpler" than its related
languages, their argument ran, its phonology ought to be less marked; in fact,
that of Nigerian pidgin turned out to be more marked, at least with respect to its
phonetic inventory, than some of its contributing languages. Such innovative
approaches as these will, one hopes, help to break some of the ideological
deadlocks which have hampered pidgin-creole studies in the past.
At the same time, one must not neglect the information that can be derived
from more traditional studies. Though historical data on the development of
pidgins and creoles is notoriously sparse, there can be no doubt that patient
gleaning can still yield many more useful facts. Hancock (63) in particular has
stressed the importance of such evidence, although an attempt to provide a
genealogy for the Lingua Franca reaching back to Egyptian times contains too
much speculation and partisan interpretation to serve as a model of its kind.
Rather more solid work has been done by Miihlhausler (94) on the early stages of
Pacific pidgins; in particular, he has shown the previously unsuspected exis-
tence of a pidgin closely related to Tokpisin on German plantations in nine-
teenth-century Samoa, and has argued plausibly, if not quite convincingly, for
the role of these plantations in the formation and stabilization of Pacific pidgins
generally. Evidence has been discovered by Bill Wilson, a graduate student at
the University of Hawaii (reported in 18), that a pidginized Hawaiian antedated,
and may well have been the ancestor, of an English pidgin in Hawaii. If, as
seems likely, this language, rather than English pidgin, was the plantation
language for the first 70 years of sugar cultivation in Hawaii, a number of
cherished sociolinguistic axioms about plantations may have to be rethought.
Chaudenson (21), as a by-product of his monumental work on the Reunion
lexicon, has shown that one widespread assumption among creolists-that the
similarities between Mascarene and Caribbean French creoles could be ex-
plained in terms of a common West African pidgin ancestor-cannot be main-
tained: too few Africans came to the Indian Ocean, and far too late, for their
speech to have had more than marginal influence on the creoles of R6union,
Mauritius, and the Seychelles. Such enquiries, though they cannot themselves
yield an adequate theory of origins, should furnish at least some of the facts on
which such a theory may eventually be based.
However, the debate about origins has definitely ceased to hold the center of
the stage, not because it has come anywhere nearer being settled, but because
interest has largely shifted to a different, if related, area-the extent to which
language universals, rather than existing individual languages, contribute to the
structure of pidgins and creoles.
UNIVERSALS
The possibility that there might be some connection between pidgins and creoles
on the one hand and universals of language on the other was voiced as early as
1939 by Hjelmslev (67). However, the intellectual climate of the time did not

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176 BICKERTON
encourage work on universals. It was not until the present decade that serious
attention was given to the idea.
What was possibly the main impulse came from linguists whose major inter-
ests lay outside pidgins and creoles. Labov, in a widely circulated but never-
published paper (81), began to ask questions which related specifically to the
functional effectiveness of pidgins. If they were reduced or simplified forms of
language, how was communication adequately maintained? If pidgins were
adequate for communication, why did creoles complicate them? These were
questions that had long gone unasked and had badly needed asking; un-
fortunately, the data on which Labov based his tentative answers was of a
quality far inferior to that of his other studies, and led him to a number of
incorrect conclusions. More explicitly concerned with universals was a paper by
Kay & Sankoff (76), which circulated in manuscript for 2 years before its
appearance in DeCamp & Hancock's book (31), and which advanced the
hypothesis that in a pidgin situation speakers discard constructions from their
own languages which are syntactically marked and are left with a small set of
unmarked structures which show little or no difference between their deep and
surface forms; in other words, they are able to employ theirfacultW de language
to select a kind of lowest common denominator of simplest forms. Such a lowest
common denominator would, it was suggested, approximate to the structure of a
universal base. At about the same time, and apparently independently, similar
suggestions were made by a number of younger scholars in the field-Agheyisi
(3), Mihlhaiusler (93), Giv6n (48)-while Traugott, who had entered the field
from historical linguistics, motivated by an interest in change processes, began
to develop a theory of "natural syntax" which was strongly influenced by the
work of Labov and Kay & Sankoff (136).
This group of scholars labored under the disadvantage that several of them
had little or no first-hand experience of pidgins, while those who did (Agheyisi,
Sankoff) were most familiar with pidgin languages (Nigerian Pidgin, Tokpisin)
which had been in existence for a considerable period of time. Yet obviously, if
pidgin speakers did have the power to reduce their language to some kind of
universal base, this power would have to be exercised at the beginning, rather
than the middle or end, of the pidginization process. In fact, such evidence as is
obtainable about more primitive pidgins hardly supports the Kay-Sankoff hy-
pothesis. In a long and thoughtful article on Chinook jargon, Silverstein (117)
showed that its speakers, far from working from any common base structure,
rather derived similar surface structures from the distinctive deep structures of
their own native languages. Nagara (95), analyzing the pidgin English of
Japanese plantation workers in Hawaii, found that much of their phonology and
syntax could be explained in terms of a direct transference of Japanese language
patterns. Subsequent investigation by Bickerton (18) has confirmed that Hawai-
ian pidgin, virtually the only true plantation pidgin which is recoverable today,
showed internal differences so gross that it is possible to determine the ethnicity
of the speaker from written texts and on grounds of syntax alone. The theory
that pidgin speakers have access to universals cannot, therefore, derive any
support from empirical studies.

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Traugott's picture of a natural syntactic base, derived partly by analogy from

Stampian natural phonology (121), is a persuasive one:
If we can accept an unordered semantic base, one which is essentially cognitive, and
which reflects a kind of semantic weighting . . . then we can argue that a natural
syntactic process is one which gives spatio-temporally ordered expression to this
unordered cognitive base, in certain restricted ways. I hypothesize, for example, that
there are natural tendencies to give analytic expression to such grammatical elements
as negation, tense, aspect, mood, logical connectives and so forth (136, p. 315).
However, she errs in attributing to pidgin speakers the capacity to recover such
a level of structure. (I will point out again, at the risk of boring the reader, that
according to the arguments of both sides, "pidgin speaker" must here be read as
"speaker of a pidgin in the early stages of its formation"; to claim it can also
have, in this context, its normal meaning of "anyone who speaks a pidgin
language," and thus include "a speaker of a pidgin language that has been
established for several generations," is simply a fudge. That Traugott shares my
definition is quite clear from her remarks on pp. 318-19 about the capacity to
simplify language.) Linguists often write about pidgins as if people in the original
contact situation had sat down and said, "We cannot understand one another,
therefore let us see if we can devise a pidgin." In fact, pidgin speakers are
generally under the impression that they are speaking some existing language,
albeit in broken form. Typical is an anecdote by Reinecke (104, p. 102) about a
Chinese laborer in Hawaii, unable to understand the instructions of his new
white supervisor, who exclaimed "Wasamalla this Haole? He no can speak
haole!" Indeed, such an attitude may persist long after the pidgin has stabilized
and become a creole; a native speaker of Saramaccan, describing to me some of
the differences between Saramaccan and its more Europeanized neighbor
Sranan, repeatedly referred to the former as "the African language."
If this is the case, then what the pidgin speaker thinks he is doing is trying to
learn an existing language, and the result of his efforts may most profitably be
compared with attempts at second language learning under extremely adverse
conditions (16, 17). Now, while the thought-experiment pidgin speaker flies
unerringly to universals, the more earthbound foreign language learner hugs his
syntactic home ground closely, and behaves very much as early-stage pidgin
speakers do. Indeed, there is something highly counter-intuitive about what is
unwittingly implied by Traugott and other members of the "pidgin-universal"
school-that the adult speaker's faculte de langage is shackled, qua foreign
language learner, but completely unbound, qua pidgin speaker. Whether one
agrees or disagrees with the Halle-Lenneberg thesis (58, 88) that language
acquisition is severely inhibited after puberty, there can be no doubt that the
language-learning abilities of children are considerably greater than those of
adults. For this reason, it would seem more natural to find access to universals
among the children of early pidgin speakers, rather than among those speakers
themselves.
The theory that creoles, rather than pidgins, come closest to language univer-
sals has been most explicitly stated by Bickerton (15). This paper suggested that

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178 BICKERTON
the similarity of creole tense-aspect systems the world over could be explained
only by hypothesizing the existence of an innate tense-aspect system, based on
human cognitive capacities, which surfaced intact, instead of being partially
suppressed in Stampian, language-particular ways, whenever the input to the
child's language acquisition device failed to find adequate data. Such a situation
would certainly obtain in an early-pidgin plantation comnmunity, where that data
would consist partly of the itself unstable and communicationally inadequate
pidgin, partly of a largely unlearnable mix of the previous generation's native
tongues. This theory is still too new and controversial to be satisfactorily
evaluated. So far it has been welcomed by Giv6n (49), whose earlier work (48)
had pointed in a similar direction, and Slobin (1 18), who found support for the
underlying semantic categories proposed in the paper in his own and others'
work on child language acquisition; however, it has been criticized by Neff (98),
who questions the interpretation of some of the Hawaiian data, and Traugott
(137), who finds the universals proposed to be "overly explicit." Obviously its
predictions must be tested empirically and over as wide a range of languages as
possible. Its most obvious advantage qua theory of creole development (for its
implications extend to areas outside this field) is that it accounts for and explains
precisely those facts which have been put forward to justify the monogenetic
hypothesis.
The debate on universals, though the newest in the field, seems likely to be the
most crucial and far-reaching in years to come. It has already attracted to pidgins
and creoles the attention of a number of specialists from other fields, and
provides an issue that is of potential interest to everyone seriously interested in
the inner mechanics of human language. However, only the next few years will
determine whether it will uncover data rich enough to make its contentions
credible, or, like the "origins" debate before it, degenerate into a theoretical
stalemate, with partisans selecting, out of a broad array of facts, those and only
those that buttress their own particular case.
VARIABILITY
If the study of universals includes more theory than fact, the sam
for another recent development-the study of variation in pidgins and creoles,
particularly in the decreolization process. As noted by Valdman (141), pre-1970
orthodoxy had ignored or at least downgraded the amount of variability to be
found in these languages. To a large extent this was a political decision, rendered
inevitable by popular accusations that they "had no grammar"; thus Hall (57, p.
107) felt constrained to argue that ". . . investigations by unprejudiced investi-
gators, using modern techniques of linguistic observation and analysis, have
demonstrated conclusively that all pidgins and creoles, even the simplest, are as
amenable to description and formulation as are any other languages." Since
those "other languages" were supposed to have regular, invariant grammars,
pidgins and creoles must be equally regular if they were to be deemed equally
worthy of study.

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However, the facts of variation had been noticed at least as early as Rein-
ecke's work in the 1930s (104, 105), and were observed in the Caribbean
somewhat later by DeCamp (28). In a penetrating and ahead-of-its-time article
by Stewart (126) that appeared in 1969, the connection between synchronic
variation and diachronic change was made explicit for the first time. Almost
simultaneously, DeCamp was working out the formalism for implicational scal-
ing, which was to become the major operational tool for the variation studies of
the 1970s (30). His research in Jamaica had indicated that variation was far from
the chaos which B. Bailey had implied when she wrote that "a given speaker is
likely to shift back and forth from Creole to English . . . within a single ut-
terance," and that "the lines of demarcation are very hard to draw" (6, p. 1).
DeCamp cut this Gordian knot by refusing to draw lines; to him, the "dialect
mixture" of somewhere like Jamaica was a "post-creole continuum" with no
"structural break" between the furthest creole extreme [which came to be
known as the "basilect," a term first used by Stewart (123)] and the form nearest
to that of the standard language [described as the "acrolect" in a paper by
Tsuzaki (138)]. DeCamp claimed that for any linguistic feature found in the
continuum, its presence in the output of a given speaker would predict the
presence of one set of features, while its absence would predict the absence of
another set (although presence would make no predictions about absence, and
vice versa). The type of table thus produced is illustrated in Table 1:
Table 1 Form of implicational scales
Features
Lects F, F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7
1 - - - - - - -
2 - - - - - - x
3 - - - - - x +
4 - - - - X + +
5 - - - x + + +
6 - - x + + + +
7 - x + + + + +
8 x + + + + + +
9 + + + + + + +
Table 1 illustrates an exceptionless implicational scale. Minuses indicate the

absence of a given feature; pluses represent its presence. Crosses indicate a
state that was not taken into account in DeCamp's original formulation, but
which subsequent work showed to be necessary, i.e. that in which a speaker
sometimes uses a given feature and sometimes, even where the opportunity
exists, does not. Scales such as this should best be viewed, not as descriptions of
data, but as abstract measures against which the degree of deviation in actual
outputs can be measured. They make certain predictions about these outputs:
for instance, Table 1 predicts that a speaker who lacks feature 5 will also lack

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180 BICKERTON
features 1 through 4, and that a speaker who possesses feature 3 will also possess
features 4 through 7. However, we can make no predictions about what will
occur to the right of a minus-a speaker lacking feature 5 may categorically lack,
or variably or categorically possess, feature 7, for example-and similarly no
predictions can be made to the left of a plus. However, we can say that if a
speaker whose output would otherwise concur with Lect 2 should possess
feature 3, or one who would otherwise occupy Lect 7 should lack feature 6, he
violates the predictions of the scale, and demands either a revision of that scale
such as will serve to accomodate him, or at the very least some attempt to
explain why he deviates from the majority pattern.
The ontological status and statistical validity of implicational scales have been
the subject of debate, but there can be no question that they have served to bring
to light many linguistic phenomena which were unobserved or inexplicable
before. In particular, they have shed extensive light on the hitherto puzzling
process of "decreolization"-that by which a creole in contact with its super-
strate may progressively lose creole characteristics and eventually come to
appear as no more than a rather deviant dialect of that superstrate. In turn, an
understanding of decreolization has helped to change radically the prevailing
opinion about the origins of Black English (see below). It has also been possible
to replicate studies and achieve closely similar results. For instance, Day (26)
found a hierarchy of environments for copula deletion in Hawaii identical to that
which Labov (79), using a variable-rule format, had found in Black English.
Similarly, Washabaugh (148) found that the environments for the replacement of
the complementizer fi or fu by tu in Providencia were identical with those
specified by Bickerton (13) in Guyana. However, his explanation of the phe-
nomenon differed in a way that illustrates the limitations, as well as the capa-
bilities, of implicational analysis.
Bickerton had argued thatfilfu replacement was determined by three semantic
categories of preceding verb: (a) modals and inceptives, (b) "psychological"
verbs, and (c) all other classes. Washabaugh, however, argued that these cate-
gories were poorly motivated-there was no obvious reason why filfu re-
placement should be determined by them-and that both his anid Bickerton's
results could be explained more parsimoniously in terms of lexical diffusion. It is
probable that in this instance, Washabaugh's analysis is the correct one. How-
ever, the general conclusion which he draws from this case-that decreolization
is above all a matter of surface forms, and that it is nowhere conditioned by the
semantic level-is hardly tenable in the light of subsequent work by Bickerton
(14, 16). The first of these studies shows that the Guyanese mesolectal pronoun
system comes into being by the establishment of an across-the-board gender
distinction which obliterates a preexisting case distinction in the basilect; re-
structuring and regularization in the light of semantactic categories, rather than
any mere filtering down of superstrate models, must be the mechanisms oper-
ating here. In the second, extensive evidence is given to show that the under-
lying Guyanese tense-aspect system goes through several quite complex
mutations before it arrives at an approximation to the English system, each

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mutation representing a slightly different semantic analysis of the nature of

states, actions, and events; incidentally, it illustrates one case-the acquisition
of "strong" past forms-where lexical diffusion might have been expected to
operate but where it fails to do so.
The moral of all this is that implicational scales can never determine the form
of the grammar. Though they can be used effectively to display the data that
needs to be accounted for-as has been done by Day (26), Odo (100), Peet (102),
and Perlman (103) for parts of the Hawaiian continuum, for instance-and may
serve to suggest grammatical explanations, these suggestions may be misleading
(as the case discussed indicates) and in any case need to be supplemented by
traditional methods of linguistic analysis. Awareness of this need to provide
adequately motivated explanations is clearly present in the work of younger
Caribbean scholars such as Cooper (22), Roberts ( 111), and especially Rickford
(109, 110), who has demonstrated the interaction of phonological and sem-
antactic considerations in the workings of the decreolization process, in par-
ticular tracing the disappearance of the doz habitual aspect marker in mesolectal
creoles, which he argues, very convincingly, helped to produce the "distributive
be" of Black English.
Although most studies of creole variation have used a continuum-type model
based on DeCamp's original, mention should be made of an alternative ex-
planation, suggested by Tsuzaki for Hawaii (139) and at least partially endorsed
by Labov (80), i.e. that of "co-existent systems." In fact, no study has yet
succeeded in drawing any kind of satisfactory boundary line between a creole
and its related standard (an apparent exception will be examined in the next
paragraph), or in dividing a creole into any of the subsystems which from time to
time have been hypothesized. We must therefore conclude that "co-existent
systems" are lacking in reality. All that can positively be argued in their favor is
that speakers of creoles may regard them as "real," i.e. any creole speaker will
tell you unhesitatingly whether a given sentence is creole or not (trouble only
starts when you get two creole speakers to do this). But one should beware of
confusing "psychological reality"-a popular rallying cry-with "what the man
in the street thinks is going on." If what people do in their daily life contradicts
what they say they do, one should regard as "psychologically real" that which
underlies their consistent actions, rather than the way those actions may be
rationalized. In fact, when one asks creole speakers about their language, one is
likely to tap, not some level of intuitive folk wisdom, but residues of the untruths
about language taught them in the schools.
It will have been noted that virtually all the evidence for decreolization has
been drawn from English-related creoles. No work of a similar nature has been
done on Portuguese-based creoles, although the dialect continuum of the Cape
Verde islands cries out for such treatment, and of the only two approaches to
French creoles from this viewpoint (84, 142) the former concluded that there was
no such thing as a continuum between French and Creole. However, Lefebvre's
conclusions still leave doubts. In the first place, they accord rather too neatly
with longstanding establishment beliefs about French-Creole relationships-a

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182 BICKERTON
fact that would not matter so much if, prior to the studies described above,
similar beliefs had not been held about English-Creole relationships. Secondly,
there is some factual evidence (e.g. Valdman 141) that in Haiti, if not in the
Lesser Antilles, the French-Creole distinction is by no means so sharp. Thirdly,
there is the fact that Lefebvre's analysis is based, not on natural speech, but on
retellings of a specified folk-tale, in which speakers were directly requested to
provide two versions, one "Creole" and one "French"! One can hardly con-
ceive of a methodological framework more loaded in favor of its conclusion, and
it seems likely that any study which (like all the other studies mentioned in this
section) based itself on spontaneous speech in relatively natural settings would
yield quite different results. In regions where historically related languages are
in contact over extended periods, it is hardly plausible to suggest that no results
should follow from this fact.
Perhaps the most significant insight so far derived from the study of creole
variation is that its synchronic variability may simply represent what might
under other circumstances have been diachronic change (16, 126). A similar
conclusion by Labov with respect to English sound changes (78 and numerous
subsequent works) has helped modify and expand our understanding of histori-
cal change in phonology; it seems reasonable to suppose that present and future
studies of synchronic variation in creole syntax may help to improve our knowl-
edge of a still-less-understood area, that of syntactic change.
THE BLACK ENGLISH CONTROVERSY
One specific result of decreolization studies has been a clarification of the debate
over the origins of Black English. The traditional position (77, 91, etc) was that
Black English derived from general English-perhaps with some aberrations
due to purely "social" causes-and that it showed no influence whatsoever from
African or other sources. This position began to be attacked in the early 1960s by
a school of which the most vehement spokesmen were Dillard (32-34) and
Stewart (124, 125). Their criticisms were twofold: that the "Anglicist" case
could only be supported by positing a wholly random and unprincipled selection
of features from the whole gamut of English dialects (Dillard's "cafeteria
principle"), and that it ignored or misanalyzed a number of features which by no
stretch of the imagination could be derived from English. The latter features
were claimed to be clearly of creole origin. However, in the form in which it was
first stated, their case won only a limited degree of acceptance. Black English
was, in the main, mutually intelligible with White dialects, whereas the Car-
ibbean creoles were not; indeed, if one made a three-cornered comparison
between White English, Black English, and the kind of Jamaican Creole de-
scribed by B. Bailey (6), there could be little doubt that synchronic Black
English stood closer, on virtually any measure of evaluation, to the former than
to the latter. But at a time when (as mentioned earlier) creoles were supposed to
prove their linguistic respectability by showing that they possessed rules as
regular as those of other languages, Bailey and almost all other descriptivists in

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the field felt obliged to treat them as unitary systems; moreover, to avoid the slur
that creoles were merely corrupted versions of standard languages, those sys-
tems had to be shown to differ maximally from their superstrates. It followed
inevitably that descriptions of creoles, even creoles that were really continu-
ums, turned out to be descriptions of absolute basilects. There was thus (as far as
"Anglicists" were concerned) nothing to bridge the structural gulf between
creoles and English except for literary and historical evidence. This the "Cre-
olists" had in abundance, but most of it was ruled inadmissible by the "Angli-
cists"; ironically, the more liberal attitudes towards race that were then
becoming prevalent made it easy to dismiss the kind of dialogues found in
eighteenth and nineteenth century memoirs, histories, plays, novels etc as
attempts to disparage blacks and render them ridiculous, rather than honest
efforts to reproduce their speech. A recent example of the power to distract that
this red herring still retains is given in Fasold's review of Dillard (43). Fasold,
who still apparently labors under the misapprehension that any kind of "simple
and ungrammatical" language is "creole-like," is so worried about "racism"
that he manages to miss the whole thrust of Dillard's argument-that these
allegedly "invented" literary forms happen to coincide with actually existing
forms in contemporary Caribbean creoles, about which eighteenth and nine-
teenth-century authors, were they never so prejudiced, can hardly have known.
However, as "Creolists" have developed their claims by drawing attention to
the role of decreolization-Stewart's already-cited paper (126) is perhaps the
most lucid example of this-and as the works listed in the previous section made
clear the workings of the decreolization process, hostility to the "Creolist" case
weakened and in some quarters disappeared. When a semipopular work by
Dillard appeared and was widely reviewed in 1972 (35), it met with a measure of
acceptance that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
The position of Gullah is also critical in this debate. Since Turner's classic
study (140), no one had seriously disputed that Gullah was a creole. However,
Rickford has pointed out (109) that even recent descriptions of Gullah (e.g. 24)
treated it on the pattern of other creoles-i.e. as if only the basilect existed-and
that it was therefore possible to go on regarding it as something quite distinct
from Black English. However, as has been shown by Rickford's own work, and
as will be shown more comprehensively by Stewart's ongoing, but still un-
published, work in the Sea Islands, there exists a complete linguistic continuum
linking Gullah with Black English, which closely resembles similar continuums
in the Caribbean and Hawaii.
However, it is likely that a full and satisfactory understanding of the origin and
development of Black English must await a full and satisfactory explanation of
pidgins and creoles. In an interesting paper by Berdan, favorably disposed to the
"Creolist" case (12), the author begins by taking for granted the majority
opinion in the field, that pidgins represent "simplifications" of the superstrate
language and creoles represent "complications" of the pidgin. If (as some of the
evidence in this review suggests) this view is too simplistic, and should be
dropped in favor of the theory that pidgins constitute a grossly handicapped case

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184 BICKERTON
of second language learning while creoles show a partial recourse to thefaculte

de langage (which does not, of course, exclude retention of rules and features
from any of the contributing languages) which later may be subject both to
natural changes and changes due to superstrate pressure, then Berdan's argu-
ment, that some Black English constructions such as "relative clause reduc-
tion" can be "viewed as simplifications of Standard English grammar," will
prove not so much incorrect as irrelevant.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Although pidgins and creoles have traditionally been regarded as somehow

"sociolinguistic" in themselves, there was not, prior to the present decade, very
much work on them that could properly be so termed. In recent years, this lack
has to some extent been remedied. Sociolinguistic studies of Caribbean creoles
pidgins and creoles of other areas have hardly even been considered in this
light-fall roughly into two general classes.
The first class is modeled on the Labovian, survey-oriented approach. Work
along these lines has been carried out by Winford in Trinidad (153, 154); a much
more ambitious study has been carried out by Le Page in Belize (85-87). While
Winford has concentrated mainly on establishing the speech varieties that
correlate with class and ethnic divisions, Le Page and his associates have been
more concerned with the language of the individual as an expression of his
general social allegiance. In the immense linguistic complexity of Belize (where
the presence of Spanish, Indian languages, and Black Carib alongside the usual
Caribbean-English continuum provides an unusually wide set of options for the
speaker), each speaker, according to Le Page, "creates the systems for his
verbal behavior so that they shall resemble those of the group or groups, with
which from time to time he may wish to be identified" (87, p. 2). While this
statement in essence is correct, the word creates seems hardly apt here; it
suggests that the speaker can actually "make things up," or at least select quite
freely from the whole range of features that the continuum contains. In fact, the
studies described in Section 4 indicate that this is far from being the case. The
creole menu is not a la carte, it rather consists of a series of "chef's specials,"
congeries of features in which if you select one, you must select all. Moreover, it
is surely premature to speak of selection until you know what is on the menu; the
rather inadequate descriptions of past tense and pluralization in Belize creole
contained in (85) leave it quite unclear what is being meant, sociolinguistically or
in any other way, when a Belizean selects mi kom overkom, ordi taiga-dem over
taiga. A similar connection between group allegiance and linguistic level within
the continuum is shown in Edwards' work on Providencia/San Andres creole
(38-40). Here, while again the grammatical analysis may not be above reproach,
Edwards was one of the first writers on creoles to appreciate the implicational
nature of their structure: the fact that any choice of features is constrained by,
and in its turn serves to constrain, other choices.

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The second class of sociolinguistic studies concerns itself with what Hymes
has called "the ethnography of speaking": roughly, who says what to whom,
under what circumstances, and for what purpose. Studies along these lines have
been produced by Abrahams (1), Abrahams & Bauman (2) and Reisman (108).
Such studies are valuable in that they concentrate on something which in strictly
linguistic studies is seldom mentioned, and indeed usually ignored altogether-
what speaking in particular ways means to the participants themselves. Good
studies of this kind can add flesh to the bare bones of formal descriptions, but
they run certain risks, from which the examples mentioned are not exempt. Two
sources of danger are the amorphous nature of the material, with its concomitant
problem of what, out of an infinite array of facts, may be relevant and what may
not, and the continuing lack-perhaps inevitable in view of the newness of the
field-of any substantial body of theory. These factors make for mainly anec-
dotal treatments; moreover, and perhaps in an attempt to compensate for this,
there has been an unfortunate tendency in some studies to return to a di-
chotomistic approach, with creole, African-derived and "anti-establishment"
expressions, attitudes, etc on one side of the fence, and English, white-oriented,
"pro-establishment" expressions, attitudes etc on the other. Granted these two
strands are seen as being interwoven, often in subtle ways, but one feels there is
more to it than that: that the mesolect is no mere artefact of linguistic de-
scription, but represents a middle ground in its own right, which (for better or for
worse) serves as the home base of many people, perhaps even a majority, in the
Caribbean. There are any number of ways, linguistic and nonlinguistic, in which
such people can define themselves as distinct and separate both from the White
culture which they increasingly see as exploitative, and the deep creole culture
which they still, unfortunately, perceive as "low" and "vulgar." Any simple
dichotomy means that the life-styles and speech patterns of this important group
are placed outside the scope of analysis.
DESCRIPTIVE STUDIES
The present survey has concentrated on those areas of the field which seemed of
general theoretical interest, and has in consequence mentioned only such de-
scriptive works as might have some bearing on current theoretical issues within
the field. There is no intent to disparage other studies; on the contrary, the field
suffers from a lack of straightforward, observationally adequate grammars such
as are taken for granted in many other fields of linguistics. To some extent, this
lack is due to the nature of the field; there are (or were until recently) fewer
pidginists and creolists than there were pidgins and creoles to be described, and,
to make matters worse, many languages which have been included under the
pidgin-creole rubric have only the sketchiest of typological resemblances. If
one's field is Romance or Polynesian languages, one may reasonably be ex-
pected to know something substantive about all the languages within it; to do the
same in pidgin/creole studies demands the competence of a polyglot and the

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186 BICKERTON
memory of an elephant! I will therefore merely list, far from exhaustively, what
seem to me to be some of the more interesting descriptive studies that have
appeared over the last few years, several of which are included in the pro-
ceedings of the 1975 Honolulu conference (27).
It was mentioned earlier that one of the problems in the field was the un-
availability, synchronically, of certain stages in the pidgin-creole cycle. While
its social circumstances do not exactly reproduce those of the classic pidgin
situations, the migrations of foreign workers to Germany and Australia have
produced linguistic phenomena which resemble pidginization. A number of
papers, mainly unpublished, have attempted to describe the background sit-
uation and the types of speech produced (23, 36, 47, 92). The main problem in
dealing with such phenomena is that we still do not know for certain whether the
line between a "true pidgin" and "foreigner's English" is an unbroken one, or
whether there is a sharp distinction in kind, rather than one of degree (and if so,
which side of the line gastarbeiter speech falls); hopefully, more and fuller
descriptions of both gastarbeitersprachen and true pidgins will make detailed
comparisons possible.
Growing interest in pidgins and creoles leads to a seemingly never-ending
succession of new examples coming to light. Among more recent discoveries are
pidgins, possibly creolizing or already creolized, in Nagaland, the Sudan, and
the Northern Territory of Australia. The Australian aboriginal example-Roper
River Creole, described by Sharpe (1 16)-is clearly a close relative of Tokpisin,
although its phonology shows a different substratal influence (for instance, it has
no voiceless consonants, so that talk, which serves as the phonetic model for the
verb meaning "speak, say" in virtually all Anglo pidgins and creoles becomes
dog rather than the usual tok or taak). The description of Naga pidgin-which
seems to be a blend of a Naga koine with Assamese-by Sreedhar (120) is
unfortunately too brief and compressed to give much idea of the language to
anyone unfamiliar with its related languages. The same is true of the descriptions
of Juba Arabic, an Arabic-related pidgin spoken in the Southern Sudan, and Ki-
Nubi, reportedly a creole offspring of Juba Arabic, by Bell (10) and Nhial (99).
According to Bell (personal communication), however, there are possible sim-
ilarities between the tense-aspect system of Ki-Nubi and that of the European-
language-related creoles. Obviously, pidgins and creoles which claim no Eu-
ropean ancestors present much more of a problem for the Western linguist,
especially when, as in both the Naga and Ki-Nubi cases, contributions to the
contact language must have come from at least two distinct language families.
However, their importance would be hard to overstress. Any theory about
pidginization and creolization that is based exclusively on European-influenced
models cannot but be suspect, especially if it claims universal significance;
unfortunately, clear and unambiguous cases of non-European pidgins creolizing
have not so far been proven to exist. It is therefore vital in the future to collect as
much data as possible on any situation where it is believed that, prior to
European contact, pidginization or creolization may have taken place; so far
only Sango (113) and Chinook Jargon (74, 117) have received more than cursory

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attention, apart from work by Heine (64, 65) on pidginized versions of African
languages.
With regard to better-known pidgins and creoles, some of the more interesting
papers have been concerned with the lexicon. In addition to the paper by Huttar
already cited, one may mention a paper by Frake (46)-unfortunately not
followed up by subsequent publications-on the remarkable principles accord-
ing to which the lexicon of Zamboangueno is divided between words of
Philippine and Spanish origin; a comparative word-list for Djuka, Sranan, and
Saramaccan by Huttar (69) which indicates some fascinatingly divergent routes
followed by phonological change in the three languages; and a paper by Hancock
(62) on "incoining" -his own coinage for the processes by which a creole can
expand its vocabulary without increasing its stock of loan words.
In phonology, Tinelli (133) has analyzed nasalization in Haitian creole, Papen
(101) has examined the rules affecting verb suffixes in Mascarene creoles, and
Johnson (73) has described morpheme-structure rules in the Atlantic Anglo-
creoles. All these papers show a familiarity with modern methods of gram-
matical analysis which is less often shared by the writers on syntax. In that field,
one of the most interesting contributions is Sankoff's study (112) of the marking
of relative clauses in Tokpisin, which illustrates the development of quasi-
obligatory grammatical markers out of what were originally purely functional
discourse devices (and which even now cannot be satisfactorily described
without taking discourse factors such as speaker presupposition into account).
Also discourse-oriented was a study of narrative patterns in Saramaccan by
Grimes & Glock (52). Since functional discourse characteristics would seem a
priori likely to have universal status, studies such as these should help to open up
an important new approach to future comparative studies in the field.
One thing which that field conspicuously lacks for any of its languages is the
type of compendious reference grammar represented by e.g. Schachter &
Otanes' work on Tagalog (114). A work of this type on any pidgin or creole
would serve as an invaluable base for the exhaustive cataloguing of similarities
and dissimilarities which needs to be carried out during the next decade. Most
attempts to produce grammatical overviews of individual pidgins and creoles
deserve, and many modestly claim, only the title of "sketch," but Tokpisin has
been better served than many by two accounts from Laycock (82) and Wurm
(155). These grammars, though pedagogically oriented, give good general out-
lines of the language and have the added advantage that they contain a number of
interesting texts; similar remarks would also apply to Baker's (8) study of
Mauritian creole.
The field still lacks a good general introduction. Hall's introductory volume
(57), which was not above criticism when it appeared nearly 10 years ago [see
Taylor's (131) penetrating review], has now been outdated in very many re-
spects by the research of the last decade. However, the only general work to
have appeared since (Todd 134), while it updates many of Hall's conclusions, is
unduly brief and selective in its coverage. Fortunately, by the time this review
appears, the compendious bibliography of the field by Reinecke et al (106)

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188 BICKERTON
should at last be available. This work, with its several thousand annotated
references, covers all generally recognized pidgins and creoles, is virtually
exhaustive up to 1970, and contains many of the more important titles published
subsequently; it should prove an indispensable aid to every scholar in the field.
Also of service to present and future scholars should be the Journal of Creole
Studies, under the editorship of Edgar Polome and Ian Hancock, which is also
scheduled to appear in 1976. This journal, which will contain articles on literary
and social matters relating to creole studies as well as purely linguistic treat-
ments, will supplement but not supplant what has hitherto been the only organ
devoted solely to pidgins and creoles-the Carrier Pidgin, a quarterly newsletter
formerly edited by Barbara Robson, in the future to be edited by Stanley
Tsuzaki and John Reinecke.
SUMMARY AND FORECAST
As the foregoing account should have indicated, the study of pidgins and creoles
has been passing through a period of rapid growth and diversification. Ten years
ago it was regarded as little more than a quaint backwater of linguistics; now it
tends to be treated with interest and some respect, mixed perhaps with a
measure of mild scepticism as to whether it can really deliver all that its more
vocal adherents have promised. Only time will tell whether it can maintain its
growth rate and achieve its potential, but there can be little doubt that that
potential is a considerable one. The pidgin/creole field is unique among fields of
linguistic study in that it unites the concern for specific languages of the various
areal fields with an obligation to deal in processes which, if not necessarily
universal, are at least more than family-specific. The difficulties which this
involves have already been mentioned; one should not underestimate the com-
pensating advantages.
However, the field still has a long way to go. This review, as well as chroni-
cling its achievements, has tried also to indicate some of the limitations which it
must overcome. It should not be forgotten that its resources, in terms of scholars
and sheer finance, are far less than those of many areal fields, and yet need to be
spread over a vaster area of ground. The spread so far has been remarkably
uneven. It is hardly surprising perhaps that of the only three studies of pidgins or
creoles that have obtained financial support on a really generous scale, two have
been in the United States (in what are almost the only two pidgin-creole areas
America has, Hawaii and the Sea Islands) while the third has been in a politically
sensitive dependency of Great Britain (British Honduras). There is nowhere
any institute or university department devoted to the study of pidgins or creoles;
there is no chair of pidgin and creole languages in any European university.
Considering the potential that the field has for adding to our knowledge of the
human language faculty, and through that faculty to our knowledge of the human
mind itself, one can but hope that these deficiencies will be speedily remedied.
But the remedying of them will in turn depend on the capacity of the field, within
the next decade, to maintain its present rate of development and prove beyond
doubt the indispensability of its contribution to a complete science of man.

41.141.179.227 on Mon, 06 May 2024 18:42:27 +00:00
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PIDGIN AND CREOLE STUDIES * 9575

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A recurring problem in the field has been the precise definition of

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underlying semantics. Such writers on French creoles as Valdman (143) and

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pidgin to English and a group of substratal languages on the basis of Chomsky-

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Traugott's picture of a natural syntactic base, derived partly by analogy from

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Table 1 Form of implicational scales

Table 1 illustrates an exceptionless implicational scale. Minuses indicate the

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mutation representing a slightly different semantic analysis of the nature of

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THE BLACK ENGLISH CONTROVERSY

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of second language learning while creoles show a partial recourse to thefaculte

Although pidgins and creoles have traditionally been regarded as somehow

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SUMMARY AND FORECAST

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1. Abrahams, R. D. 1972. The training port on NSF Grant No. GS-39748,

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of American English-paradox, vir- 52. Grimes, J. E., Glock, N. 1970. A

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70. Huttar, G. L. 1975. Sources of cre- 88. Lenneberg, E. H. 1967. Biological

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105. Reinecke, J., Tokimasa, A. 1934. guages in the Caribbean. In Study

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137. Traugott, E. C. 1976. Pidginization, linguistic evidence in favor of the

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