McWhorter

John H. McWhorter
//"Before the official establishment of creole studies, some prominent thinkers treated creole languages as genetic offshoots of their lexifier; e.g. Haitian Creole as a kind of French rather than as a separate language (Hjelmslev 1938, Hall 1958). Concentrated research starting in the late 1960s however, suggested otherwise. Bickerton (1981, 1984) identified creoles as the product of catastrophic breakdowns of lexifier grammar. Meanwhile, Alleyne (1980a), Boretzky (1983), Holm (1988) and other called attention to the extensive role that substrate languages played in the development of these creoles after the breakdown Bickerton referred to." p. 788//

//"Founder Principle" p. 788 can someone expand on this? // // i think that the "Founder Principle" is speaking to the idea that there is this superstrate language, the introduced language and that 'creoles' are just dialects of these Founder languages, as opposed to them being a whole new language. //

//"Chaudenson supposes that as this influx mounted, new slaves gradually came to be exposed less to whites' native variety of the lexifier than to slaves' approximations thereof, this becoming their primary model" p. 789//

//"Under this scenario, plantation creoles were the end result of a series of such 'approximations of approximations'." p. 789//

//"...the superstratist model in fact proposes a radical reconception of the frame of reference within which creole studies have been conducted over the past forty years" p. 790//

"//I will argue that CREOLE is a synchronically definable typological class; that this class is demonstrably the result of the pidginization of lexifier sources; and that linguisitc plausibility and historical documentation speak against the foundations of the superstratist model." p. 790//

//"The fourth keystone of the superstratist model is the assertion that creole is not an empirically valid classification// //term, since nothing distinguishes the creole from other languages."// p. 790

"//Mufwene finally takes the superstratist framework to a further conclusion, that since// //creole is presumably a vacuous term, one language cannot be more or less 'creole'// //than another (1994b:71, 1997a:59-60).//" p. 790

McWhorter posits that contrary to the "superstratist" notion of creoles being mere offshoots of various languages, they can be typologically classified "synchronically" rather than just sociohistorically.

"//The natural result is the virtual of complete elimination of affixes, sometimes replaced by more immediately transparent analytic constructions." p. 793//

//"Specifically, creoles are the only natively spoken languages in the world that combine all three of the following traits:// //1. little or no inflectional affixation// //2. little or no use of tone to lexically contrast monosyllables or encode syntax// //3. semantically regular derivational affixation" p. 798//

//i think it will probably also be important that we dig into the arguments against the 'superstatists'. using their assumptions:// //- early 'creoles' are actually just close approximation of Founder languages, or lexifiers// //- developed 'creoles' are simply varieties of their lexifiers// //- nothing distinguishes creoles from other varities (of the lexifiers) that have undergone extensive language contact// //- no language can be more or less creole than another. (that is to say that all languages are fully developed, as they are, per their lexifiers or just by them being a superstrat language)//