1-3
4-6
7-9
10-12
13-15
16-18
19-21
22-24
25-27
28-30
31-33
34-36
37-39
40-42
43-45
46
languages, accidental serialization seems to be much more frequent. Non productive
accidental verb serialization as it occurs in Arawakan and Romance languages is more
prone to grammaticalization, probably because of a factor of "saliency". Alemanic
dialects, for example, developed serial uses of GO which grammaticalized rather
rapidly into categorial uses remindful of prepositions and adverbs.
ix däd go ge Eshinge ge shaffe go
[I would GO GO Donaueschingen GO work GO]
"I might as well go to work in Donaueschingen"
accidental serialization, not to an earlier state where verb serialization was
productive in the sense of a process available to all verbs in the lexicon.
CONCLUSIONS
answered within the framework of a theory of glottogenetics.
developmental and evolutionary aspects of language genesis (cf. Wittmann 1980). This
includes not only the question of the ultimate origin of natural language but also
investigating claims of alleged genesis of "new" languages from old.
as seen in individual speakers, children and adults, linguistic phylogenesis is the
resulting evolution seen through time. The impact of the individual speaker in the
transmission of language is not predictable in any quantum-oriented way, the impact
of masses of individual speakers is interpretable phylogenetically. Natural
phylogenesis will tend to be regular as to the change and gradual as to the diffusion
of that change. Cases were changes seemingly lack regularity AND gradualness of
diffusion are conceivable cases of glottogenesis. Cases of conceivable glottogenesis
arise in two particular situations of language contact.
to a superstrate language, the transmission of the superstrate languageMAYgive
rise to a stable pidgin the syntactic make-up of which cannot be explained clearly as
the phylogenetic outcome of either substrate or superstrate. In time, such a pidgin
may become nativized through first language acquisition in the speech of monolingual
speakers. A clear case of a non-nativized pidgin is Nigerian Pidgin English (also
spoken in parts of Cameroon where nativization is clearly incipient) and a clear case
of a nativized pidgin is Tok Pisin (superstrate vocabulary borrowed from English,
substrate vocabulary from various native languages of Papua). Nativized pidgins,
inappropriately called creoles, borrow their vocabulary to a greater extent from the
superstrate language though the resyntactification cannot be shown to derive clearly
in most cases from any substrate input. Such "new" languages, in their turn, are
subject to regular phylogenesis and are typologically indistinguishable from "old"
languages. The koine-creole differences of colonial French obviously cannot result
from such a renewal process though the original koine of the 17th century clearly is
a resyntactified version of Gallo-Romance (Wittmann 1995).
target languageMAYgive rise to relexified varieties of the source language along
lines constrained by variables inherent in relexification (the syntactic markers of
the source language must be maintained to a significant extent in a phonetic shape
derived from the source language;cf. Muysken & Smith 1990, Wittmann 1992, Wittmann
& Fournier 1996). Clear cases resulting from a relexification process are Media
Lengua, Mitchif and Karipuna. Varieties of creole French cannot be considered to be
the outcome of a relexified variety of Gbe as has been claimed in some literature
(Lefebvre & Lumsden 1994b with frequent remakes therafter in the Journal of Pidgin
and Creole Languages and elesewhere):
(Muysken & Smith 1990, Wittmann 1992, Wittmann & Fournier 1994, 1996, DeGraff 2001);
of generative grammar reflect the fundamental unity of the workings of principles and
parameters of Universal Grammar, not the workings of relexification processes
(Wittmann & Fournier 1994, 1996);
closely related to Gbe than Haitian Creole or any other variety of creole French
(Wittmann 1995, Wittmann & Fournier 1994, 1996);Conversely stated, the typological
correspondances of Haitian Creole and Gbe are crucially overrated and the frills of
Haitian in this respect are skillfully weeded out (Wittmann 1987b, Wittmann &
Fournier 1996, DeGraff 1999, 2000, 2001)
notoriously unreliable (Wittmann & Fournier 1994, 1996, Degraff 1999, 2000, 2001).
French. The only published evidence available for scrutiny (Lefebvre & Lumsden
1994a) demonstrates beyond any doubt that their comparison is biased in favor of a
systematic exploitation of the frills of Standard French (Wittmann 1998b) though the
principal investigator is a native speaker of a non-standard koine variety of
colonial French. The conspicuous absence of koine data from their comparison raises
questions of ethics that I think couldn't have been raised, for very obvious reasons,
elsewhere in this paper.
come out seriously in defense of any of their hypotheses.
processes on any count. Innovations and a few instances of substratal input set
apart, creole French is for the most part a natural product capitalizing on the
frills of a pre-existing drastically restructured koine. The extent to which the
pre-existing koine is something "new" out of "old" is open to another debate.
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