Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar
The Case of Haitian Creole

An examination of creole genesis, showing how mechanisms from source languages show themselves in creole.

Claire Lefebvre (Author)

9780521025386, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 March 2006

480 pages, 13 tables
22.9 x 15.4 x 2.6 cm, 0.705 kg

"...[this book] is a model of careful argumentation, including clear description of the methods and assumptions involved in the underlying research...the book is admittedly written for those with special interest in pidgin and creole languages..." Linguistics

This study focuses on the cognitive processes involved in creole genesis - relexification, reanalysis and direct levelling - processes which the author demonstrates play a significant role in language genesis and change in general. Dr Lefebvre argues that the creators of pidgins/creoles use the parametric values of their native languages in establishing those of the language that they are creating and the semantic principles of their own grammar in concatenating morphemes and words in the new language. This theory is documented on the basis of a uniquely detailed comparison of Haitian creole with its contributing French and West African languages. Summarizing more than twenty years of funded research, the author examines the input of adult, as opposed to child, speakers and resolves the problems in the three main approaches, universalist, superstratist and substratist, which have been central to the recent debate on creole development.

Preface
List of abbreviations
1. The problem of creole genesis and linguistic theory
2. Cognitive processes involved in creole genesis
3. The research methodology
4. Functional category lexical entries involved in nominal structure
5. The preverbal markers encoding relative tense, mood and aspect
6. Pronouns
7. Functional category lexical entries involved in the structure of the clause
8. The determiner and the structure of the clause
9. The syntactic properties of verbs
10. Are derivational affixes relexified? 11. The concatenation of words in compounds
12. Parameters
13. Evaluation of the hypothesis
14. Theoretical consequences
Appendices
Notes
References
Indexes.

Subject Areas: Sociolinguistics [CFB]