Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 13, Issue 1, 1998

This paper discusses evidence of an early pidgin in use amongst Aboriginal people of the north west coast of Western Australia. The crucial evidence comes from an Italian manuscript describing the rescue, by local Aborigines, of two castaways wrecked on North West Cape in 1875. The data reveals that the local Aborigines attempted to communicate with the Italian-speaking survivors using what appears to be an Australian language spoken some 300 kilometers further along the coast, around the emerging center of the new Pilbara pearling industry. I present an analysis of the material, showing that it differs from Australian languages of the area in significant ways and can be considered a reduced variety. I conclude that this variety is an indigenous pidgin — the first to be described for Australia.

Afrogenesis is taken here to mean the belief that the English-based Atlantic creole languages originated on the West Coast of Africa. This paper shows that Afrogenesis, originally proposed in work by Hancock and by Smith, and now given a new lease on life by McWhorter, is at best highly dubious. The same is true of any single-source, diffusionist account of the similarities between the English-based creoles.

A multifunctional item is a lexical item that has more than one function. This paper argues that the determiner of Haitian and Fongbe is a multifunctional head. It can appear as the head of several functional category projections, namely, DP, MoodP, TP, and AspP. Given the Projection Principle, how can a single functional item appear as the head of different functional category projections? My account of the multifunctional character of such functional items is twofold. First, multifunctional heads lack categorial features. Second, the category of the projection of a multifunctional head is determined by its complements. It is expected that a multifunctional item will be the object of variation among speakers. The data analyzed in this paper are drawn from a sample of speakers of both languages. Two clear patterns emerge which I will refer to as grammar 1 (which includes speakers of both Haitian and Fongbe) and grammar 2 (which also includes speakers of both Haitian and Fongbe). The striking fact about these data is that the same cluster of properties distinguish grammar 1 from grammar 2 in both Haitian and Fongbe.