Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 10, Issue 2, 1995

According to the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, the core grammars of all "real" creoles should be alike to a significant degree. Real creoles are then defined as those creoles that were born on plantations, as opposed to those that appeared in so-called fort situations, that is, around trading posts and the like. The validity of the hypothesis depends on the precise characterization of what counts as a plantation situation, which is by no means an obvious task, contrary to what seems to have been assumed. An attempt toward such a characterization is made here. Tayo, a French-based creole spoken in the south of New Caledonia, can be considered a plantation creole and should therefore appear similar to, for example, Haitian and Isle-de-France Creole. That it differs radically from these languages in such basic domains as the determiner and the TMA systems, however, is easily demonstrated. Factors that might explain the difference are then examined, with the conclusion that only relexification from a substrate New Caledonian language can be retained as the primary reason for this difference. Although arguably a plantation creole, Tayo falls thus clearly outside the scope of the LBH, appearing rather as strong supportive evidence for the Relexification Hypothesis. Given the importance of the case for deciding between competing theories, further detailed investigation is urgently needed in order to ascertain whether Tayo is indeed a plantation creole, as it is seems to be, in view of the available historical and ecological evidence.

Hawaii Creole English presents a particular type of utterance structure, the "dollar utterance," which might be regarded as ill-formed in terms of the form-meaning coalition in Standard English (SE). Nonetheless, such an utterance seems to reflect an underlying discourse process in which three discourse representations — Theme, Scheme, Rheme — interact. An analysis is given within the framework of Schema theory to explain this unique linguistic phenomenon in Hawaii Creole English. The scheme, which is the most important entity of the three, resides either in the preceding text or in the abstract knowledge structure of human cognition. It is further claimed that the formation of Theme, Scheme, Rheme could have been transferred from Japanese as one of its substratum features in discourse. The probability of Japanese substratal influence is highly supportable from both linguistic and sociohistorical evidence.

This paper shows that the Atlantic English-based Creoles share six features which are derivable neither from superstratal, substratal, nor universal influences, and therefore constitute idiosyncratic correspondences. The six features indicate that these Creoles all derive from a single ancestor of expanded structure, in contrast to the dominant polygenetic scenario under which the Atlantic English-based Creoles emerged, in essence, independently of one another in their respective locations. The findings have implications for all conceptions of creole genesis, in arguing for diffusion as a pivotal, rather than marginal factor. The features discussed are copulas da and de, pronoun unu, anterior marker bin, adverbial self and the obligative verb fu.