Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

238 Part 3: Language and Variation
either support or reject it. Some of those who opposed it argued that creoles
may emerge gradually rather than as rapidly (in one generation) as
Bickerton had claimed (e.g. Arends, 1993, 1995). Others argued that the
features of creoles could be attributed to the infl uence of the substrate languages
(e.g. Alleyne, 1986; Lefebvre, 1998). Those with this view were
called the ‘substratists’ (also labelled ‘substratomaniacs’ by Bickerton).
Still others, known as the ‘superstratists’, argued that the features of creoles
could be traced back to both standard and non-standard varieties of
the lexifi er language (e.g. Chaudenson, 1992, 2001). This controversy led
to a great deal of sociohistorical research being done on the origins and
development of P/Cs. Such research included rigorous documentation of
the different substrate populations of slaves or indentured labourers in the
various locations where P/Cs emerged, and accounts of the languages
they spoke. Drawing on historical sources – such as early texts, travellers’
accounts, court records and government reports – scholars have also been
able to paint a clear picture of the historical development of the linguistic
features of many P/Cs – for example, Bislama (Crowley, 1990) and Korlai
Portuguese Creole (Clements, 1996), and more recently, Hawai’i Creole
(Roberts, 2005) and Mauritian Creole (Baker and Fong, 2007).
Findings from the descriptive and sociohistorical work over the past
two decades have refuted the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis. For
example comparative descriptive work in Singler (1990) and Winford
(1993) demonstrated that the degree of similarities among grammatical
features of creoles has been exaggerated. Later, in addition to the earlier
sociohistorical research reported in Arends (1995), Roberts (1998, 2000,
2005) showed that Hawai’i Creole, pivotal to Bickerton’s hypothesis,
took at least two generations to develop, and that the fi rst generation of
children born on the plantations were actually bilingual in their parents’
language and the developing pidgin. Furthermore, research demonstrated
that substrate languages, rather than any innate language faculty,
most probably provided models for features of creoles, such as Hawai’i
Creole (Siegel, 2000) and Suriname creoles (Migge, 2003) (see also
Migge, 2007).
However, controversies about creole genesis remain. On one side is the
classic view that creoles are the result of the expansion of a restricted
pidgin predecessor (e.g. McWhorter, 2005; Siegel, 2008). On the other side
is the view that creoles result from gradual restructuring of the lexifi er
through the usual processes of language change (e.g. Mufwene, 2001;
DeGraff, 2003). The pidgin predecessor view sees creoles as new languages
while the gradual restructuring view sees them as versions of their lexifi er.
(It is interesting to note that the latter view is held mainly by scholars
working on French-lexifi ed creoles [see Alleyne, 2000].) Nevertheless, one
point that both sides agree on is the role of processes of second language
acquisition (SLA) in creole formation, and recently this has become an