Zelinsky’s (1992) (1973) “Doctrine of First Effective Settlement,” accord- ing to which
Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dis- lodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance to the later social and cul- tural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been . . . in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants generations later.
(1992 (1973):13–14)
However, I have been inspired almost exclusively by biology rather than cul- tural geography. The terms in usage there for the same idea are Founder Principleand Founder Effect. I am sticking to this model and will not refer to Zelinsky simply because I became aware of his work after the revised substance of this book was already in place. I will explore in later work ways in which it can improve my approach to language evolution.
such recreations may amount to a new communal system that is different from the target. The divergence which has resulted from such restructuring is characterized as a change.
A creole is a restructured variety of its lexifier. The latter was primarily the colonial variety which was spoken by the European colonists and was itself developing from the contact of diverse metropolitan dialects. It has often been identified as a koiné (e.g., Chaudenson 1992, Corne 1999).2As explained in chapter 1, this is in itself a restructured variety, which has also developed by competition and selection of features from the different dialects of the same language. This view definitely complicates things, but usefully, as it helps determine the particular role played by non-Europeans in actuating the changes that produced creoles. More and more detailed studies of nonstandard varieties of European languages have revealed fea- tures that are (partially) related to those of creoles. Note, for instance, uses of done as a marker (Christian, Wolfram, and Bube 1988;
Tagliamonte 1996), ofdoes+ Verb ([dəz] in Gullah) and be+ V-ingor non- verbal Predicate as markers (Clarke 1997a), of durative a(“a- prefixing,” Wolfram 1980), and of a null copula (Giner and Montgomery 1999; Martin and Tagliamonte 1999). Even the preverbal progressive marker [də] in Gullah ([dε] in other English creoles) is matched by basically the same construction in Newfoundland vernacular English (personal observation, August 1999).
Restructuring partly consisted in modifying functions of the grammati- cal features selected from a language into an emergent variety. For instance, the English preposition forparticipated in the restructuring that produced several English creoles. In addition to being selected as a purposive and causal preposition, it was also extended to function as a modal predicate and as a complementizer (Mufwene 1989a, 1996a). This extension was facilitated by the fact that a nonverbal item can be used predicatively without a copula in these new vernaculars. Thus, the same kinds of exapta- tions which are associated with grammaticization were applied in some syn- tactic environments to extend its basic purposive prepositional function to a modal one without necessarily changing its syntactic properties.
The reorganization also consists in recombining in a new system features which formerly did not belong in the same one, as may be determined by the diverse origins (dialect and language-wise) of several features of any creole.
Such is the case with the collapsing of the function – which is commonly expressed in most SubSaharan African languages – with the typical function of nonstandard English demin the same system.3
The term Founder Principle(Harrison et al. 1988), is used here, along with founder population, to explain how structural features of creoles have
been predetermined to a large extent (though not exclusively!) by character- istics of the vernaculars spoken by the populations that founded the colo- nies in which they developed.4 European colonies typically started with large proportions of indentured servants and other low-class employees of colonial companies (see e.g., Beckles 1990; Kulikoff1991a, 1991b; Menard 1991), and thus with speakers of nonstandard varieties of the creoles’ lexifi- ers. This proletarian background of the colonies generally explains the sev- enteenth- and eighteenth-century nonstandard origins of several features of creoles. Further, some features which might be considered disadvanta- geous in the metropolitan varieties of the lexifiers – because they were rare, not dominant, and/or used by a minority – may well have become advanta- geous in the speech of the colonies’ founder populations. The founder pop- ulation produced what Nettle (1999:15) identifies as “amplifiers of variation,” with variationto be interpreted as “diversity,” having to do with
“differentiation” (p. 30). This is accomplished at least by accumulating new combinations of variants or by weighting them differently (p. 17), because of biases toward some variants or speakers (p. 25).
Examples include the construction with après+ Infinitive and the construction with pour + Infinitive in nonstandard French, or locative–progressive constructions such as be up(on)V-ingin earlier varieties of English (now also attested as be a-V-inin some nonstan- dard varieties). For any subset of the reasons discussed below, these fea- tures have been selected into the systems of some creoles, although not necessarily with the same systemic distribution as in the lexifier.5Through transmission from one generation of speakers to another, they have become deeply entrenched, as predicted by Wimsatt’s (1999, 2000) principle of
“generative entrenchment.” That is, barring some stochastic events in the evolution of a language variety, the oldest features have a greater chance of prevailing over some newer alternatives simply because they have acquired more and more carriers, hence more transmitters, with each additional gen- eration of speakers.
The typical population-genetics kinds of explanations for the dominance of such would-be disadvantageous features in a (colony’s) population are:
(i) such features may have been reintroduced by mutation; (ii) they may have been favored by new ecological conditions in the colony; or (iii) the colony may have received significant proportions of carriers of the features, a situation which maximized the chances for their successful reproduction.
I argue below that in the development of creoles the second and third reasons account largely for the restructuring of the lexifier. True mutations are rare, though there are plenty of adaptations. The developments of creoles are instances of natural adaptationsof languages qua species to changing ecological conditions. In every colony, selection of the lexifier for
2.1 Introduction 29
large-scale communication in an ethnographic ecology that differed from the metropolitan setting called for adaptations that resulted in a new lan- guage variety.
The notion of “ecology” will be discussed in detail in chapter 6. Worth recalling here is the distinction stated in chapter 1 between species-internal and species-external ecologies. The former pertains to the coexistence of features in a language variety, whereas the latter subsumes, in our case, the contact of a linguistic system with another and the general ethnographic context in which it is used. The allocation of some factors to internal or external ecology also depends on the focus of the analyst. For instance, while discussing a language such as English brought to North America from the British Isles, dialectal variation can be considered internal ecology.
On the other hand, the same variation can be considered external ecology if the analyst focused only on the London dialect coming in contact with British Southwestern English in, say, Virginia. The main idea is that when there are alternative strategies for the same or similar grammatical func- tions, each of the variants becomes part of the ecology for the others and each one of them can be affected by what happens to the others. Simple sys- temic relations among different aspects of a system are also part of this internal ecology. For instance, as shown above, whether or not the preposi- tion for can develop into a purposive modal depends, from an internal- ecology perspective, on whether or not a nonverbal predicate phrase must combine with a copula in the emergent variety.
Except where considerations are obviously different, as between prag- matic and structural principles, there is no clearcut boundary between internal and external ecology. The notion of coordinate bilingualism in which linguistic systems are kept separate is a myth that is inconsistent with, for instance, the speed of second language acquisition compared to first language acquisition. The contact of language varieties, hence of lin- guistic systems, in the mind of a speaker produces a set-theory union of fea- tures that is analogous to a gene pool in population genetics. Nettle (1999:5) identifies it as a “linguistic pool,” which unfortunately does not rule out languages as part of the pool. A more adequate counterpart to the notion of “gene pool” is perhaps “feature pool,” although the concept of
“feature” is not an ideal analog of “gene” either. However, as observed in chapter 1, there is no particular reason why every structural notion appli- cable to a biological species should also be applicable to a linguistic species, nor why the latter should be thought of in all respects like the former. I prefer the name “feature pool” to “linguistic pool” simply because the term
“feature” refers more specifically to parts or components than the term lin- guistic.
The coexistence of linguistic systems in a set-theory union fashion
(perhaps complemented by a tagging system for specific languages) seems in fact to be the simplest explanation for interference. Regardless of their origins, the coexistent features compete with each other. When the tagging conventions that associate them with different, yet overlapping, systems have failed, there is confusion, identified in the context of language contact as interference. That coexistence of features and its consequences is an important ecological factor that accounts for some of the evolutionary pro- cesses that produced creoles, ranging from the unrounding of French front rounded vowels in Haitian Creole to the extensive use of serial verb con- structions based partly on models such as aller prendre“go get” in French itself.
Because several geographically distant metropolitan varieties of the lex- ifier came into contact with each other in the colonies (Le Page 1960; Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985), many features that distinguished them from each other were likewise engaged in the competition, once they formed a larger pool in the locus of contact (in the speakers’ minds). The selection of those which became parts of colonial vernaculars often depended on congruence with features of some substrate languages (see below). An ecological approach helps us determine which factors in indi- vidual contact arenas favored the selection of advantageous features into creoles’ systems. My ecology-sensitive model of markedness (Mufwene 1989c, 1991a) was designed to answer some of the questions regarding feature selection.
As the ecological conditions changed over time (section 2.2), new fea- tures may have prevailed over some older ones, which in turn became disad- vantageous. For instance, the habitual marker [dəz] in Gullah and its counterpart [dɔz] in Guyanese Creole may have developed under labor recruitment conditions that were different from those of the founder popu- lations which had come earlier from Barbados. The later recruits from the British Isles would have created conditions more favorable to the preva- lence of the habitual or consuetudinal does ([dəz]), then attested in the Englishes of Ireland and Southwest England (Clarke 1997a:284f). The fact that in other English varieties the periphrastic does has an –
function must have been an ecological factor favoring the selec- tion of [dəz]/[dɔz] in Gullah and Guyanese Creole, which cannot have developed before the eighteenth century. In the first case the conditions for basilectalization did not obtain till after 1700, in the second the colony was not founded until 1740 (see below). The Barbadian basilectal creole texts studied by Fields (1995) and Rickford and Handler (1994) reveal no attes- tations of such a construction, which rules out the role of importation of the feature from Barbados by the original, founder popula- tions of the South Carolina and Guyana colonies. Jamaican Creole, which
2.1 Introduction 31
must have developed earlier and also has some historical connection with Barbadian (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985), has no such
construction either. Neither does Saramaccan, which also has older genetic ties with Barbadian colonial English speech. We are left with the conjecture that the feature must have been brought straight from Southwestern England and Ireland, where consuetudinal does[dəz] was already estab- lished by 1700 (Clarke 1997a:284).6
Some new features may also have prevailed without eliminating any pre- vious ones, with alternatives coexisting “happily” in the developing creole’s system, providing stable variation. For instance, in Belizean Creole, the later construction with was(Escure 1984) has not displaced the original one with [mε], the counterpart of bin/ben in other Caribbean English creoles. In such historical scenarios marked by continuous popula- tion contacts (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; Winford 1998), how an emergent vernacular is affected by new contacts depends in part on the makeup of the current system and in part on the new alternatives brought over by the new populations. For instance, did the new populations bring with them systems that are different from, or largely similar to, those of the local or target vernaculars? Factors such as regularity, semantic transpa- rency, and perceptual salience also continue to bear, sometimes in conflict- ing ways, on the selection of features into a creole’s system as it continues to evolve under changing contact conditions. Ethnographic factors such as the demographic proportion of the newcomers relative to the local popula- tions, their attitudes toward each other, and their social status also bear on how the systems in contact emerge from the competition.
As noted in chapter 1, speakers are the agents of the selection processes invoked here. It is through their communicative acts that selective advantage was conferred on some structural features over competing alternatives.
Their role as agents was made possible by the fact that their minds were the arenas of the feature competition discussed here. The plantations count as settings of contact at a second level, at which features not uniformly selected by individual speakers competed with each other for prevalence in the com- munal system. Factors such as frequency, which determine markedness values and influence feature selection, may prevail at this level, unlike struc- tural factors. This distinction is important because, as in biology, the fea- tures that gain selective advantage at the level of individuals (“individual selection”) need not prevail at the level of populations (“group selection”). It also allows variation within a population, as is typical of creole vernaculars.
Consequently, language contact is a more complex situation than has been assumed in the literature on the development of creoles. Any commu- nal language exists because speakers using systems that are not necessarily identical interact with one another. In the process they accommodate each
other in their speech habits. While still maintaining some idiosyncrasies of their own, they achieve what Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) call
“focusing.” Creoles have developed both from individual speakers’ attempts to speak the lexifier and through their mutual accommodations in the contact settings.7For convenience, we simplify this more complex picture of contact by focusing on the communal language level. In reality, however, the primary actions identified here through the notions of competition and selection take place in the minds of individual speakers. Recognizing the reality described in this section enables us to account for variation within the community.
2.2 The development of creoles: what the histories of individual colonies