The following is a brief assessment of the theoretical implications of the social and linguistic data in this volume.

Regarding the terminology, theories and sociohistorical data discussed in chapters 1 to 3, we can conclude that sociolinguistic factors are essential parts of the definition of both pidgins and Creoles. While one could draw up a list of structural features shared by most of the Atlantic Creoles (cf. chapters 5 and 6), few would claim that these could be used to determine that a language is a Creole without reference to its sociolinguistic history.

The validity of the theories put forward to explain the genesis and development of pidgin and Creole languages crucially depends on whether these theories can satisfactorily take into account the many, various and complex sociolinguistic circumstances under which the known pidgin and Creole languages came into being and developed. The social history of the speakers of the seven pidgin and Creole languages surveyed in chapter 3 casts light on some of the major issues, particularly in the context of the broader survey in Holm (1988–9, vol. II). These issues include nativization and the role it plays in determining the structural complexity of Creoles as opposed to the relative structural simplicity of pidgins. Another primary factor in defining pidgins has been their stability, but it now appears that this is irrelevant to the likelihood of a pidgin becoming a Creole. While stability enables us to distinguish pidgins from jargons or pre-pidgin continua, creolization appears to depend instead on social factors, with either pidgins or jargons providing adequate input.

Introduction

This and the following chapters on phonology (5) and syntax (6) compare a number of Creoles of various lexical bases by linguistic level. These Creoles share many features on all three levels which are not found in their lexical source languages. These similarities are discussed at some length because of their importance as evidence for various theories purporting to explain their origins, principally the monogenetic versus poly genetic theories (2.10), and universalist (2.12) versus substratist theories (2.13). Although some of the evidence used in these debates has been from phonology (e.g. Boretzky 1983), the most obvious linguistic level on which to seek features common to Creoles of differing lexical bases has been syntax. The level of lexicon, which can be used to establish the similarity of languages in more traditional groupings, is not an obvious area in which to seek similarities among languages which have different vocabularies. In the early contact situations, the original pidgins and then the Creoles that grew out of them had to use vocabulary that came primarily from the lexical source languages in order to serve their first function as bridges for communication. In the Atlantic colonies the Europeans spoke the language of political, economic and social power and the Africans, who had no such power in their state of slavery, had to do most of the linguistic accommodating.

Pidgins and creoles and linguistics

What earlier generations thought of pidgin and creole languages is all too clear from their very names: broken English, bastard Portuguese, nigger French, kombuistaaltje (‘cookhouse lingo’), isikula (‘coolie language’). This contempt often stemmed in part from the feeling that pidgins and Creoles were corruptions of ‘higher’, usually European languages, and in part from attitudes toward the speakers of such languages who were often perceived as semi-savages whose partial acquisition of civilized habits was somehow an affront. Those speakers of Creole languages who had access to education were duly convinced that their speech was wrong, and they often tried to make it more similar to the standard. With few exceptions, even linguists thought of pidgin and Creole languages as ‘aberrant’ (Bloomfield 1933:471) if they thought of them at all – that is, as defective and therefore inappropriate as objects of serious study. The analogy seemed to be that broken English, for example, was of as little interest to the linguist as a broken diamond would be to a gemologist.

It is only comparatively recently that linguists have realized that pidgins and Creoles are not wrong versions of other languages but rather new languages. Their words were largely taken from an older language during a period of linguistic crisis to fill an urgent need for communication. This makes them appear to be deformed versions of that older language.

Introduction

This chapter is a study of some syntactic features that are shared by a number of Creoles (both Atlantic and non-Atlantic) but not by the standard languages from which they draw their vocabularies. The number of such features is quite large, and they are so widespread that their existence can hardly be explained by mere coincidence. One of the most central issues in Creole studies has been the development of a theory of genesis that satisfactorily accounts for these syntactic similarities. The grammatical features discussed in this chapter are generally considered to be of primary importance in evaluating the relative merits of these theories, which are discussed in some detail in chapter 2. The orientation of the present study is that these common features reflect the influence of both superstrate and substrate languages, as well as universals of adult second-language acquisition, creole-internal innovations, or the convergence of all or some of these sources.

Sources of Creole syntax: universals

Language universals – in the Greenbergian or Chomskyan sense of general parameters on possible structures rather than the Bickertonian sense of specific, innate structures – seem likely to have played an important role as a filter in the selection of syntactic features in the pidgins and the Creoles that grew out of them. With few exceptions, basilectal Creoles rely on free rather than inflectional morphemes to convey grammatical information. This seems likely to have resulted from a universal tendency in adult second-language acquisition to isolate such information through lexicalization, i.e. using a word rather than an ending to convey such information as tense.

The cross-linguistic survey continues in this chapter, in which we turn our attention to noun phrases whose definiteness or indefiniteness is due to something other than presence or absence of an article. The range of these “complex” definites (including proper nouns, personal pronouns, and noun phrases containing a demonstrative or possessive modifier) and indefinites was outlined in Chapter 1 in relation to English, and here we look at their forms, structures and behaviour more widely. Some of these expressions are central to an understanding of what definiteness is and how it works, and will play an important part in the discussion in subsequent chapters. The grammar of these noun phrase types is complex, and the discussion here will be limited to pointing out the most salient aspects, enough to enable us to consider how they fit into the general system of definite and indefinite noun phrases.

Demonstratives

Demonstratives are probably to be found in all languages, and they seem to be inherently definite – which is in part why definite articles almost always arise from them historically, presumably by some process of semantic weakening. Bear in mind, however, that in Chapter 1 I entertained the possibility that this assumption of inherent definiteness could be mistaken, an indefinite demonstrative existing in the form of such. This possibility will be examined below, and rejected; in this section I anticipate this finding, and continue to assume that demonstratives are universally definite in meaning. Note that if this is correct, it seems to mean that definiteness exists in some form in all languages.

A number of grammatical processes appear to refer to the feature [+ Def], in the sense that they only apply when this feature is present. An example is object marking, which, as we have briefly observed, only takes place in some languages for definite objects. An alternative way to view such phenomena is that definiteness is only encoded in certain grammatical contexts; thus, for some languages, definiteness is only marked in object position. Apart from restrictions of this kind, some grammatical categories interact with definiteness in that they are encoded together on the same formative – number and gender on the French definite article for example. There are also certain grammatical structures in which a definite element may be inherent; in this connection we will consider the relevance of definiteness for the theory of empty categories.

Direct object marking

We saw in 2.4.1 that some languages have adpositional object markers which are restricted to occurring with definite noun phrases. On the face of it, it is debatable whether these adpositions are “articles” (encoding definiteness) or object markers. There is good reason to believe the latter is the correct conclusion, in part because it is not always, if ever, strictly or only definiteness that is the decisive factor in their appearance. In fact the phenomenon is not limited to such adpositional markers, but extends to what appear to be accusative case morphemes.

Having established a provisional (and clearly less than satisfactory) conception of what definiteness is, and with a picture of the kinds of determiner and noun phrase that are central to an understanding of definiteness, we are now in a position to survey the languages of the world to see how the definite–indefinite distinction is expressed. We begin this survey in this chapter by examining what I have called “simple” definite and indefinite noun phrases. These are noun phrases which correspond in terms of what they express, if approximately, to English noun phrases in which [± Def] is signalled by, at most, one of the articles the, a, sm. In the next chapter we will extend this survey to “complex” definites and indefinites. Bear in mind that the term “article” is being used here informally, to mean any linguistic form which has as its central function to encode a value of [± Def] (or [± Sg] in the case of cardinal articles). It thus covers aaxal definiteness markers as well as free-form determiners. On the basis of what we have seen in English, we may expect articles more widely to act as default members of larger categories of definite or indefinite expressions, to be obligatory (except perhaps under certain generally specifiable conditions) in the absence of other such expressions, and to be unstressed and perhaps phonologically weak. We will in fact see that these expectations do carry over to many languages, but that they cannot all be taken as universal properties of articles.

This chapter sets the scene by presenting some basic issues and ideas, which will be investigated in greater depth in the rest of the study. It begins by examining the concept of definiteness itself, to establish a preliminary account of what this concept amounts to. This is followed by consideration of the various types of noun phrase which are generally regarded as definite or indefinite – since definiteness and indefiniteness are not limited to noun phrases introduced by the or a. Finally, some basic ideas concerning the syntactic structure of noun phrases are presented in outline. English is taken as the starting point, with comparative observations on other languages where appropriate, because it is easier and less confusing to outline basic issues as they are instantiated in one language, where this can be done, than to hop from one language to another. For this purpose, English serves as well as any language, since it has readily identifiable lexical articles, which make definite and indefinite noun phrases on the whole easy to distinguish. It is important to bear in mind that the discussion in this chapter is preliminary, and aims at a tentative and provisional account of the points examined. Many of the proposals made here and solutions suggested to problems of analysis will be refined as the study progresses.

What is definiteness?

I begin in this section by attempting to establish in informal, pretheoretical terms what the intuitions about meaning are that correspond to our terming a noun phrase “definite” or “indefinite”.

I have argued that definiteness is a morphosyntactic category, grammaticalizing a pragmatic category of identifiability. With this in mind, we will now consider the representation of definiteness in syntax. This means discussing recent developments in the theory of phrase structure according to which definite and indefinite determiners do not, as traditionally assumed, modify nouns, but rather themselves head noun phrases. This view, the DP hypothesis, is part of a more general theory of “functional heads”, and I shall in fact argue that the category of definiteness is itself such a functional head. Almost all current work on the noun phrase assumes the DP analysis, but since much still important less recent work on definiteness is cast within the NP analysis, I begin by examining the syntactic representation of definiteness in this older framework.

Other questions to be considered along the way include: What is the category status of articles and other determiners? Are there constraints on the positions in which definite determiners may occur in the noun phrase? Are certain determiners, including definite articles, specified in the lexicon as [+ Def], or does definiteness arise in a noun phrase in some other way? How can the range of article types occurring in languages be accounted for? How does the analysis of definite pronouns relate to that of definite full noun phrases? These are fairly obvious questions arising from our earlier discussion, particularly from the comparative survey of Chapters 2 and 3. We will also look more closely at the phenomenon of nonconfigurationality, attempting to relate it to the theory of functional heads.

In the discussion of the nature of definiteness in Chapter 1, various distinctions apparently subsidiary to that between definite and indefinite were made: identifiable and inclusive, situational and anaphoric, specific and nonspecific. We will examine these distinctions more closely in this chapter, with a view to determining whether they warrant splitting the concepts of definite and indefinite into a number of independent parameters of meaning, which just happen not to have distinct encodings in certain languages. In other words, could it be that English the expresses two or more separate semantic categories, misleading us into failing to see them as distinct? Or that “definite” is a broad, superordinate category embracing a number of distinct but related categories, which can be expected to be separately encoded in some languages? There are also semantic distinctions, like that between generic and non-generic, which appear to be independent of that between definite and indefinite, but which interact with the latter distinction. Generics are typically definite in form in some languages, but not in others. But generics do have a lot in common with definites in terms of behaviour, so the question arises: are they also a kind of semantically definite expression which does not necessarily appear in definite form in certain languages (like English) in which the encoding of [+ Def] by an article is limited to a more restricted version of definiteness? Finally, we return to the analysis of proper nouns, which we have seen resemble generics in being overtly definite in form in some languages but not in others. It will be suggested that proper nouns are a kind of generic.

It is appropriate to devote some attention to the emergence and development of markers of definiteness, because a great deal has been written on this topic, both from the point of view of general historical linguistics and in work on particular languages or language families. Indeed, in the course of the present study, I have repeatedly made reference to the diachronic sources of articles in other, typically demonstrative, elements. It may be too much to say that this area of morphosyntax is more prone to historical change than others, but research indicates that it is possible to trace quite radical shifts acecting definiteness and determiners, sometimes over relatively short time spans. In this chapter I will examine three aspects of this issue: first, the acquisition of a syntactic category of definiteness by languages previously lacking it; second, the emergence of articles from other, substantive, determiners; third, the subsequent development of articles and definiteness.

The emergence of functional structure

Until recently, most research on the appearance of definiteness marking in languages which had previously lacked it concentrated on the process of semantic weakening whereby a demonstrative, or other determiner, became a definite article. But the development in the last few years of the theory of functional categories, including the DP analysis of the noun phrase, has made it possible to look at the question in new ways. It is assumed that languages vary in what functional projections they have (so that, for example, a language with no number marking can be taken to lack NumP), and the absence of DP in a given language should have the consequence, on the standard DP hypothesis as outlined in 8.2, that this language has no class of determiner.

At various points in the discussion so far I have observed that certain positions or contexts within sentences or utterances require a noun phrase occurring there to have a particular value of [± Def] (or to be interpreted as having such a value). Restrictions of this kind, termed “(in)definiteness ecects”, provide the diagnostics for definiteness introduced in Chapter 1. They relate, moreover, to the suggestion that definiteness plays a role in guiding the hearer through the organization of information in discourse, interacting therefore with other concepts and distinctions in the structure of communication. The behaviour of definiteness in its discourse and sentence context is examined in the present chapter.

Discourse structure

We begin by looking at the place of definiteness in that area of pragmatic theory which has been variously termed “discourse structure”, “information structure”, “thematic structure”, among other labels. It is concerned with the ways in which sentences package the message conveyed so as to express the relationship between this message and its context or background. For discussion see Lambrecht (1994), Vallduví and Engdahl (1996).

The organization of information

The oppositions topic–comment, theme–rheme, given–new, presupposition–focus figure prominently in this literature. But the variation in the use of these pairs of terms is considerable. To a large extent they are used interchangeably, though for some writers one opposition closely overlaps with another rather than being equivalent to it; and with each opposition there is variation over whether the terms are taken to denote linguistic expressions or the referents of these expressions. The following remarks represent a synthesis, glossing over much of this variation.