17h00
salle 124
SEANCE REPORTEE (journée de grève)
(séance par visioconférence)
Silvia Kouwenberg (U. West Indies, Mona)
The role of second language acquisition in creole genesis
There is general consensus that second language acquisition (SLA) played a role in the formation of creole languages. Opinions diverge on the centrality of SLA to creole genesis, and on the extent to which creole languages display the properties of interlanguages. In this talk, I will review some of the models which have been proposed, including:.
Ingo Plag's view of creole languages as early interlanguages.
Jeff Siegel's view of creole language formation as involving a feature pool which draws, among others, on interlanguages, and involving functional transfer from L1 languages.
Tonjes Veenstra's multigenerational model of creole language formation, including early SLA followed by first language acquisition.
Pieter Muysken's view that advanced SLA played a role in creole genesis.
Salikoko Mufwene's view of creole genesis as involving cycles of imperfect replication by L2 acquirers..
Authors often call upon demographic factors which are thought to have limited access to the lexifier. However, we will see that this does not suffice to account the fact that the lexifiers were not fully acquired, and that attitudinal factors need to be taken into consideration. Furthermore, a distinction between L2 acquisition and L2 use may help explain pervasive functional transfer of L1 properties in creole genesis, but not in "normal" SLA. Finally, we will see that different approaches to the role of SLA in creole genesis have implications for the genetic classification of creole languages.
Becker, Angelica and Tonjes Veenstra. 2003. The survival of inflectional morphology in French-related creoles: The role of SLA processes. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 25, 283-306.
Mufwene, Salikoko. 2008. Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change. London/New York: Continuum
Muysken, Pieter. 2015. Conclusion: feature distribution in the West Africa-Surinam Trans-Atlantic Sprachbund. In Pieter Muysken and Norval Smith, eds. Surviving the Middle Passage. The West Africa-Surinam Sprachbund , pp. 393-408. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Plag, Ingo. 2008, 2009. Creoles as interlanguages. 4 columns, published in Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages vols. 23 & 24.
Siegel, Jeff. 2008. The emergence of pidgin and creole languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van der Wal, Jenneke and Tonjes Veenstra. 2015. The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages. Folia Linguistica 49 (1), 85-116.
