{"id":1284,"date":"2010-12-20T22:00:43","date_gmt":"2010-12-20T20:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1284"},"modified":"2010-11-30T12:04:19","modified_gmt":"2010-11-30T10:04:19","slug":"gradual-creolization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1284","title":{"rendered":"Gradual creolization"},"content":{"rendered":"
Gradual creolization: <\/strong>Studies celebrating Jacques Arends. Ed. by Rachel Selbach<\/strong>, Hugo C. Cardoso,<\/strong> and Margot van den Berg<\/strong>. (Creole language library 34.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. x, 392. ISBN 9789027252562<\/a>. $158 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt<\/strong><\/a>, University of Bochum<\/em><\/p>\n

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 \u2018Linguistic analysis\u2019 and Part 2 \u2018Social reconstruction\u2019.<\/p>\n

It comes as no surprise that five articles focus on Surinamese creoles, Arend\u2019s main area of expertise. Bettina<\/strong> Migge<\/strong> and Donald<\/strong> Winford<\/strong> 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<\/strong> investigates the lexical contributions of English and Portuguese to Saramaccan, while George Huttar<\/strong> analyzes the lexical influence from various African languages in Ndyuka. Marvin Kramer<\/strong> 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<\/strong> reassesses sociohistorical data gathered by Jacques Arends.<\/p>\n

Another five contributions discuss Caribbean languages whose histories\u00a0 closely resemble those of the Surinamese creoles. Silvia Kouwenberg<\/strong> (Jamaica), Don Walicek <\/strong>(Anguilla), and William Jennings<\/strong> (French Guiana) compare the sociohistorical background of these countries to that of Surinam. Marie-Christine Haza\u00ebl-Massieux<\/strong> examines variation in the expression of possession in historical sources for various French creoles. Finally, Claire Lefebvre<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

The papers by J. Clancy Clements<\/strong> and John Ladhams <\/strong>focus on the origins of Portuguese creoles: Clements studies both historical written language data and contemporary children\u00b4s speech of Daman Creole Portuguese (India), whereas Ladhams presents a descriptive overview of Portuguese creoles worldwide based on historical language data. Pieter Muysken <\/strong>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 <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n

The volume also includes research on (historical) pidgins, and at least two of the articles focus explicitly on them: Hans den Besten<\/strong> investigates Khoekhoe phonological influence on early Cape Dutch Pidgin, and Magnus Huber<\/strong> 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<\/strong>, 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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gradual creolization: Studies celebrating Jacques Arends. Ed. by Rachel Selbach, Hugo C. Cardoso, and Margot van den Berg. (Creole language library 34.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. x, 392. ISBN 9789027252562. $158 (Hb). Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, University of Bochum The book analyzes the question whether creolization is a gradual or abrupt process. Dedicated to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1285,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284\/revisions\/1285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}