On Haitian Creole borrowing /plat/ , on reanalysis, etc

[Sally Thomason]

The kind of reanalysis that Michel is talking about is, as he
suggests, very common indeed in shift-induced interference,
even in not-very-intense contact situations.  But I don't see
how it can have anything to do with the question of a "radical
break in transmission" as far as CJ is concerned, given that
NO one has (to the best of my knowledge) ever suggested that
CJ is the product of any kind of direct transmission from
French, radical or otherwise.  It merely has a bunch of words
borrowed from French, and few of those show up in the earliest
documentation -- I believe (and I doubt if I'm idiosyncratic
in this belief) that they're later borrowings (i.e. not even
shift-induced interference, though they certainly reflect
imperfect learnign of French), words that entered CJ years or
even decades after CJ was a fully crystallized pidgin (not
creole) language.

This doesn't, of course, mean that Haitian Creole arose by
a radical break in the transmission of French.  Like Michel,
I find Chaudenson's approach very appealing for the kinds of
creoles he's talking about -- that is, creoles for which the
early contact period can reasonably be presumed to have promoted
the learning of French (or some other European language), with
later-arriving waves of slaves or other immigrants learning
increasingly un-French-y varieties of a target language.
I'm not wowed by Chaudenson's apparent assumption that his
scenario applies to *all* creoles (much less pidgins), though:
sometimes the demographics won't fit his picture.

The crucial point, it seems to me, is that different routes
to pidginization and creolization can and do sometimes produce
(partly) similar linguistic results.  The interpretation of
French articles as part of the stem rather than as separate
morphemes is just one of many examples of similar results
from different developmental processes: you find it in CJ,
which started as a classic trade pidgin; in Haitian Creole, which
(here I certainly accept Michel's expert opinion!) developed by
gradual divergence from French through successive waves of
learners; and in (for instance) some Athabaskan languages of
interior Canada, which certainly borrowed the words directly
from French, not via CJ.

   -- Sally