Pidgins, Creoles and (Un)Markedness

[Michel DeGraff]

RE:

> Let me say that since ChInuk Wawa preserved e.g. a sound system and
> perhaps some syntax which is marked, in universal terms, it occurs to me
> to wonder whether the language has retained other marked features, e.g. in
> grammar.   My intuition and my understanding are that pidgins and creoles
> tend to display less-marked structures than their lexifier languages,
> generally speaking.  However counterexamples come easily to mind; isn't
> there a dual and even a trial number in Tok Pisin pronouns?

Here's yet another potential counter-example, which I was just discussing
with a student.  Predicate clefts for contrastive or emphatic purposes show
up in a range of languages, including in Haitian Creole.  The
predicate-movement constructions exhibited in HC (e.g. with verb copying
and with XP movement accompanied by a special marker in the predicate
position) are not found in the lexifier (French).  The Kwa (`substrate')
languages exhibit somewhat similar constructions, but with different sorts
of constraints on the category and trajectory of the moved unit.  There's
nothing in the HC predicate-cleft construction that looks `unmarked' in any
straightforward sense of the term.  It seems to me that the idea that
creole languages *uniformly* reflect unmarked settings is one of these
received notions with little empirical and theoretical support ---
alongside the notion that (so called) radical creoles (like HC) necessarily
emerge through an abrupt `pidginization' phase that eliminates virtually
all morphology.

                                 -michel.
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