Pidgin inflectional morphology and its implications for creole morphology

Abstract

1 This paper goes against a number of widespread assumptions about pidgins and creoles. It is often stated that creoles have little or no morphology and that pidgins have no morphology, e.g. Seuren (1998: 292–293): " If a language has a Creole origin it is SVO, has TMA [tense-mood-aspect] particles, has virtually no morphology, etc. " (cf. also Hjelmslev 1938 on pidgins). Others can be found in DeGraff (2001). Pidgins are maximally reduced, it is often said, and when they become native languages or when they become the main language of a community, they also expand structurally into languages called creoles. This absence or paucity of morphology has long been accepted as the truth in creole studies, but the empirical facts about pidgins and creoles contradict those statements and assumptions. In fact, there is some derivational and inflec-tional morphology in a number of creoles and pidgins. Surprisingly, however, it appears that pidgins are in fact in some respects morphologically richer than creoles, even though the latter are supposed to be expansions of pidgins. Pidgins, creoles and pidgincreoles 2 (the last of which we consider a separate category) have two important traits in common with each other: they are all recognizably derived from one or more other languages, but they are more or less drastically reduced. The lexicon is (much) smaller than that of the lan-guage(s) from which the lexicon is derived. In addition, very few of the gram-matical traits of the lexifier languages are actually preserved in the pidgin or creole. This reduction is quite clear also in the morphology: very little of the inflectional and derivational possibilities from the contributing languages are preserved. This paper will focus on pidgin morphology, for which I have perused a large database of as many pidgins as possible, using mostly primary documen-tary sources. Information regarding creoles is more superficial in that I rely often on secondary sources. In section 1 I will define what I mean by pidgins, defined from a social rather than a structural perspective. In section 2 I briefly argue why we need a third, in-between, class, of pidgincreoles, beside pidgins and creoles. In section 3 I discuss the concept of morphology, in order to make a number of distinctions that are often not clearly made. Thereafter I discuss the possible sources of morphological markers in pidgins and creoles in section 4. Section 5 presents a survey of inflectional marking in pidgins and creoles. Some generalizations are provided in section 6, and explanations for the results are discussed in the concluding section 7.