Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 22, Issue 2, 2007

According to Ehrhart and Corne, Tayo is an endogenous creole that crystallized under the peculiarly plantation-like circumstances present at the St-Louis mission in the late 19th century. Noting some linguistic similarities with Reunion Creole, Chaudenson (1994) raises the question of whether Reunion Creole had had any influence on the development of Tayo. This notion is refuted both by Ehrhart (1994) and Corne (1994, 1995, 1999, 2000a, 2000b), although Corne (2000a) concedes that due to some linguistic and socio-demographic evidence, Reunion Creole influence on Tayo cannot be excluded. This paper revisits this debate and reopens questions that earlier researchers appear to have closed by discussing the implications of two texts written in Reunion Creole and published in New Caledonia. The first is a Georges Baudoux text containing the ‘Reunion Creole’ of Socrates, a black Reunion Creole taken to New Caledonia in 1870 to work as a coolie. The second is a political text attacking a ‘Creole’ candidate running for election on the Conseil Supérieur des Colonies published in 1884 by journalist Julien Bernier, an immigrant from Reunion. Accepting the authenticity of these texts raises questions pertinent to the debate on Tayo genesis. Given that réunionnais was being spoken in New Caledonia when Tayo was developing, were any speakers in contact with the Kanaks of St-Louis? What, if any, influence did their language have on the developing St-Louis patois? I discuss these questions by re-examining socio-historical evidence and by making some brief comparisons between the New Caledonian Reunion Creole texts and Tayo.

Notwithstanding limited micro-sociolinguistic information on who spoke what, how, when, where, and in what other relevant circumstances, Melville’s two major semi-autobiographical novels of the Pacific, Typee and Omoo, invite an analysis in terms of an ethnohistory of speaking, i.e. the restoration of historical linguistic attestations by triangulation with comparative evidence following philological principles and the critical interpretation of extralinguistic, sociohistorical factors by ethnological criteria. In spite of their Anglophone spellings, Melville’s attestations of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin are reconstitutable by comparative evidence from Polynesian source languages, especially Hawaiian, Marquesan, and Tahitian. These recordings deserve recognition for their accuracy on grounds of their overall structural consistency with independent historical data. While the novelist did not explain how he had obtained these recordings, linguistic contrasts suggest that Hawaiian served as a prime (although not exclusive) source of information in full or pidginized form.

The paper offers a comparative study of the syntactic structure of nominal constituents in French Lexifier Creoles (FLC). In spite of the superficial variability observed in the distribution of FLC determiners, the paper argues that FLC have a common functional architecture and presents both conceptual and empirical arguments in support of this view. Variability, the paper proposes, is the result of extensive phrasal movement inside this common architecture that is triggered by the functional heads of FLC. Whether a given FLC determiner is a functional head or not is taken to reflect grammaticalization processes modeled in the Minimalist framework. This novel approach to grammaticalization and particularly to ‘semantic bleaching’ is shown to have a structuring effect that accounts for the ordering differences manifest across FLC determiners.