Notes on the January SPCL Conference

The Annual Meeting of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics took place on January 8-9, 2005 at the 79th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Oakland, CA. It was not as well attended as previous meetings (perhaps everyone else went to Curaçao last summer?), and we missed seeing many of the "old faces" we tend to see year to year. Even the traditional SPCL banner was nowhere to be seen.

As always, of course, there were a number of very stimulating and important papers that were presented. The standout for me was "(Re)conceptualizing the Creole (and Pidgin) Prototype" by Ian R. Smith, which sought to find the middle ground between John McWhorter's arguments for a creole prototype and objections (especially by Salikoko Mufwene) against McWhorter's proposal. This involved recasting McWhorter's prototype idea more in terms of standard prototype theory (SPT), which Smith argues satisfies many of Mufwene's objections and allows creoles to "still be seen as occupying a significant corner of the variation space populated by natural languages". This approach towards defining creole prototypicality departs from McWhorter's proposal in a number of key repects. For instance, McWhorter's prototype is economically restricted to three prototype attributes believed to be sufficient for defining creoles as a synchronic class. Although gradience of creolehood is an important facet of the model (which critics sometimes overlooked by citing the lack of clear-cut boundaries between creoles and non-creoles as an empirical problem), it can be quite difficult — if not impossible as Smith suggests — to define gradience with these three features. In SPT attributes are weighted as more central to the category than others, and the number of potential attributes is unrestricted, which allows the creolist to consider other structural characteristics and even sociohistorical factors. This results in a non-discrete category that is defined not by its borders but through the degree of internal similarity among its members. McWhorter's three features may be highly weighted in comparison to other potential attributes, but these may not be the only highly weighted attributes that determine core similarity and thus the category may include members that "differ among themselves" without having a single "best exemplar," as Mufwene (2000:65) puts it. This is by no means the first attempt to discuss creole prototypicality in terms of SPT, but Smith's contribution looks like a positive direction for a debate that has too often been mired in unfruitful controversy, and I look forward to reading more on this — including hopefully critiques on Smith's proposal by Mufwene, McWhorter, and other leading figures in the debate.

I also enjoyed "Contact-induced grammaticalization in early bilingual development" by Stephen Matthews and Virginia Yip which concerns treating one-relatives in Singapore English (e.g. "They grow one very sweet," meaning "[The fruit] that they grow is very sweet") as deriving from "replica grammaticalization" on the basis of Cantonese structures. One-relatives were also the considered in Bao Zhiming's paper on "Markedness in Creole Genesis". Matthews and Yip examined acquisition data from Chinese-English bilingual children and found similar patterns and suggested that contact-induced grammaticalization forms part of bilingual L1 acquisition. However another possibility is "apparent grammaticalization" (as Adrienne Bruyn defines it), which involves merely the transfer of the result of a grammaticalization process, but the acquisition data may indeed suggest an ontogenetic process of grammaticalization. I eagerly look forward to Matthews and Yip's forthcoming Cambridge University Press book which will explore the matter in detail.

Jessica White presented on "Women and Linguistic Choice in Creole Genesis: A Sociohistorical Account," which stands quite close to my research interests. White is reexamining the social context in which Guinea Coast Creole English developed in the 17th-19th centuries and specifically the role of women in shaping linguistic practice. In particular, White considers how African and Afro-European women functioned as linguistic mediators in contact situations and used contact English as symbolic capital for attaining and sustaining socio-economic power. It remains to be seen however whether White's more nuanced account will help clarify whether earlier GCCE played a significant role in the genesis of Sierra Leone Krio (as held by Ian Hancock) or not.

These were some of the papers I found most interesting, and special mention should be made to Aya Inoue of the Univeristy of Hawai'i who presented "A Quantitative Study on Past Tense Reference in Hawai'i Creole English," which focuses on language internal and external factors in the variation of the past tense marker wen. I will have more to say about this interesting study sometime in the coming weeks. Also, Carol Myers Scotton gave a plenary on "The Grammatical Abruptness of Language Shift," and she gave the following as an example of Hawai'i Creole English as data:

(1) Get wan wahine shi get wan data. "There is a woman who has a daughter."

Scotton however characterized the second get as a "relative" when it is really a possessive verb (the relative is instead marked by shi, see the discussion of pronoun copying in relative clauses in Sakoda & Siegel 2003:104 and in Derek Bickerton's Roots of Language [1981]). This is a very minor point tho, since the example is still valid as an instance of reanalysis with respect to the first get, which functions as an existential.