Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2006

There is increasing evidence that most European-lexifier plantation creoles developed over several generations, as successive waves of African slaves acquired increasingly basilectal varieties of the lexifier language, allowing shift-induced interference to play a central role in creole genesis. If in most cases the creators of creoles were adult learners of a second language, and if many of the creole features are the result of second language acquisition over several generations, the next step is to test the hypothesis and to see whether data from current case studies on second language acquisition can shed light on the gradual creolization process. This paper shows that many of the features found in French-lexifier creoles do occur in L2 French and other interlanguages, as a result of L1 transfer and other acquisition processes; examples discussed include word-order within the noun phrase, pronominal clitics, the absence of copula, reduplication, the reanalysis of articles, grammatical gender, verb movement and TMA markers. The major claim of the model of creole genesis advocated here, which can be called the ‘gradualist / second language acquisition model’, is that creole genesis does not involve any specific mental processes or strategies other than those found in ordinary second language acquisition. While in normal, successful second language acquisition, L1 transfer, relexification and reanalysis are relatively marginal in the end, they are nevertheless present, as illustrated in the examples provided here. It is the social and historical circumstances that accelerated the changes and allowed ?deviant? interlanguage structures to fossilize and to create a new language from the linguistic chaos of plantation societies.

The formfu(variantu) fulfills several functions. It is a preposition selecting NPs and clauses, tensed or infinitival. It is a mood marker occurring either between the subject and the verb, or before the subject. It is a complementiser selected by predicates of thewant-class; as such it is in a paradigmatic relationship with other complementisers in the language. Finally, in some contexts,fuappears to function as a case marker, rather than as a preposition, as it may be associated with several thematic roles. The first objective of the paper is to provide a detailed inventory of all the functions offuand a detailed description of its properties for each of its functions. This will be done mainly on the basis of published sources. The proposal thatfucan head various syntactic projections (P, Force, Fin, Mood, Kase) will be shown to account for its multifunctional character. The second objective of the paper is to discuss the origin of the properties offu. First, we consider the grammaticalisation scenario proposed in the literature. In this scenario, the prepositionfuwould have been reanalysed as a complementiser. We argue that this scenario is not an optimal one. Second, we consider a relexification scenario along the lines of Lefebvre (1998b). Although the form of the lexical item in question is derived from Englishfor, as has been noted by several authors, most of its other properties cannot be derived from this lexical item. A comparison of the properties offuwith those of corresponding lexical items in one of the substratum languages of Saramaccan, Fongbe (e.g. Smith 1987), yields a different conclusion: while the form of the Saramaccan lexical entry is derived from English, the bulk of its semantic and syntactic properties are derived from those of corresponding substratum language lexical entries. The properties of the creole lexical entry thus appear to follow from the re lexification account of creole genesis. In this case, however, two substratum lexical entries (nú, preposition and complementiser, andní, mood marker and complementiser) appear to have been relexified on the basis of a single superstratum formfor, yielding the creole lexical entryfucumulating all the functions of the two substratum entries. Some details distinguish the creole lexical entry from the two substratum ones. It will be shown that the make up offuhas also involved some reorganisation of the original lexicon, and some innovation.