Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, University of Bochum
The book analyzes the question whether creolization is a gradual or abrupt process. Dedicated to Jacques Arends, who firmly believed creolization to be gradual, this highly interesting volume represents a collection of seventeen papers that cover a wide range of structural phenomena and languages. The papers are grouped into two sections: Part 1 ‘Linguistic analysis’ and Part 2 ‘Social reconstruction’.
It comes as no surprise that five articles focus on Surinamese creoles, Arend’s main area of expertise. Bettina Migge and Donald Winford argue for internal developments (rather than different substrate and superstrate effects) to account for different expressions of possibility in the Surinamese Maroon creoles and Sranan. Peter Bakker investigates the lexical contributions of English and Portuguese to Saramaccan, while George Huttar analyzes the lexical influence from various African languages in Ndyuka. Marvin Kramer focuses on the tonal characteristics of quantifiers in Saramaccan and argues that they must be attributed to Kikongo rather than Fongbe influence. Finally, Norval Smith reassesses sociohistorical data gathered by Jacques Arends.
Another five contributions discuss Caribbean languages whose histories closely resemble those of the Surinamese creoles. Silvia Kouwenberg (Jamaica), Don Walicek (Anguilla), and William Jennings (French Guiana) compare the sociohistorical background of these countries to that of Surinam. Marie-Christine Hazaël-Massieux examines variation in the expression of possession in historical sources for various French creoles. Finally, Claire Lefebvre analyzes a visible increase in the range and inventory of double object verbs in Haitian Creole, which she states to be less frequent in Fongbe, its main substrate language.
The papers by J. Clancy Clements and John Ladhams focus on the origins of Portuguese creoles: Clements studies both historical written language data and contemporary children´s speech of Daman Creole Portuguese (India), whereas Ladhams presents a descriptive overview of Portuguese creoles worldwide based on historical language data. Pieter Muysken describes the gradual transformation of Incaic imperial Quechua into a morphologically less complex variety. Examining missionary sources, he argues that European domination led to the changes described. Philip Baker discusses the documentation of bimorphemic words in historical documents from English- and French-lexified pidgins and creoles, showing that it takes a long time for a creole to reach grammatical consistency.
The volume also includes research on (historical) pidgins, and at least two of the articles focus explicitly on them: Hans den Besten investigates Khoekhoe phonological influence on early Cape Dutch Pidgin, and Magnus Huber discusses the possible existence of a West African Pidgin Portuguese, thus arguing in favor of the continuity of a language without native speakers. The article by Christine Jourdan, who discusses Solomon Islands Pijin, analyzes the development of a pidgin into a creole: when does a pidgin become a creole, and when does a contact language turn into a main language?
All in all, this volume is clearly inspired by the works of Jacques Arends, who not only defended a gradualist approach to creole formation, but also pushed for a combination of theory-oriented and empirically-driven work. The papers collected here represent exactly such an approach.