John Holm and Creole Linguistics
Linguists who meet John Holm today, a newly retired Professor Catedratico with a chair in English Linguistics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and one of the most eminent creolists in the world, might imagine that his path to academic prominence must have been the usual sort of straight-line progression: high school to college to graduate school, followed by tenure-track academic employment and a steady climb through the ranks. This would be a mistake. John’s career path has been impressive indeed, but far from ordinary. He came to languages and to creoles early, but mostly not in classrooms. His background doesn’t immediately suggest adventure. John was born in 1943 and grew up in Jackson, Michigan, which is not the most exotic of towns. His family was hardly the monolingual and monocultural Midwestern stereotype, however. His Danish father was a much travelled electrical engineer — he lit up Islamabad — and an ex-sailor; his mother’s family descended from the Volga Germans who were taken to Russia by Catherine the Great, and she made sure her children knew about German culture. Both parents valued the languages of their original home countries, and all the other languages they met on their travels. They also leaned left in their political views, which made life dicult during the Communist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s; so at one time they considered moving to Uruguay. This plan inspired the whole family to study Spanish, and John remembers the excitement of using the language to open up new perspectives later during a family vacation trip to Mexico. By the time John reached high school his interest in languages was firmly established, and he studied German, Spanish and Russian. A short-lived summer job in Arizona in 1961 evolved into an impromptu hitch-hiking trip to Mexico and then Nicaragua, where he ran out of money but began his life-long journey into creole linguistics. As he describes it, ‘One of the most amazing things I discovered there was that black people from Nicaragua’s Caribbean
Variability of the Copula in Black English and Its Creole Kin
THE STATUS OF THE COPULA' in United States black English vernacular (BEV) has received considerable attention from American linguists over the past decade, and rightly so: its subtleties lead us right to the heart of the question of BEV's identity and its relationship to standard American English. Labov (1972a, p. 227) points out that "the question arises whether or not a copula is present in the deep structure or higher-level structure of BEV; and if so, whether it is then deleted as a whole on the morphological level or by lower-level phonological rules. These are important questions for both theoretical and applied linguistics, for they bear on the issue of how dialects of a language differ, and how they are to be taught." This paper will examine the syntactic constraints on Labov's variable rule for the deletion of the BEV copula (1969) to the exclusion of phonological considerations, the justification for this approach being evidence in Bickerton (1975, p. 154) that in the related question of the acquisition of the past tense (part of the same chain linking basilect to acrolect), it is clear that "grammatical constraints outweigh phonological ones." Rules relating the behavior of the BEV copula to that of standard English (e.g., wherever SE can contract, BEV can delete) will be re-examined in the light of evidence relating the BEV copula to those of other Afro-European languages. The operation of Labov's variable rule for the contraction and deletion of the BEV copula is affected by "the following grammatical environment, which constrains the rule in the order (from least favorable to most favorable to deletion) predicate noun phrases; adjectives and locatives; verbs; and the auxiliary gonna before a verb"(1972a, p. 228). Bickerton (1971, p. 491) found a similar hierarchy of following syntactic environments favorable to the deletion of the copula in the Guyanese mesolect.2 To see if this pattern could be found in other creoles, I examined two varieties: transcribed recordings of Jamaican (JC) in Le Page and De Camp (1960, pp. 143-79); and Gullah in Turner (1949; pp. 260-88). The pattern which emerged can be seen in table 1.3 In both creoles the syntactic environment most favorable to zero copula was a following adjective (sixty-
The Origin of West Indian Creole Languages: Evidence from Grammatical Categories1
T HE classification of the creolized languages of the Caribbean, as to genetic origin, is a difficult and important matter. The answer that one gives both reflects and affects assumptions, not only about the specific processes of Caribbean history, but about the general nature of socio-linguistic change as well (Hymes 1959). It is often assumed that the West Indian creoles originated in the places where they are now spoken from the slaves' faulty imitation of their masters' English, Dutch, French or Portuguese speech; and that they are but new dialects, so to say, of these traditional languages, whose phonologies, grammars and lexicons they have simplified, reduced and corrupted, but not superseded. Lexical evidence favors this assumption clearly in most cases, less so in others: cf. Saramaccan "ei hen muje8 pai wdn mujgemii, n6S h~n di 6to 6mi pal wdn w6mimfi, de ti mifi 6 to6u" (if his wife gets a daughter, while then the other man gets a son, the two children go and get married) (Voorhoeve 1959:441), containing in all 21 morphemes of which 10 have English, 7 Portuguese, 3 Yoruba and 1 Dutch as their source.2 Phonological and grammatical evidence is much less favorable to the assumption, to say the least. Since the phonological evidence is a highly technical subject, I shall say no more about it here except to remark that neither English nor Portuguese is, like Saramaccan, a tone language, nor has, like it, implosive stops and fortis and lenis nasals-all of which features are characteristic of West African languages. Here I shall first discuss the formation of creoles in general and in particular, together with some opinions that have been expressed concerning their affiliation. Then I shall take up an important part of the grammatical evidence, outlining the handling of aspect, mood, and tense in one English and two French-linked creoles, so as to illustrate some discrepancies between them and their putative European "parents," and to point out the dangerous consequences of imposing alien grammatical categories upon the data. Finally, I shall try to answer some criticism of an earlier article of mine on the same subject (Taylor 1956), and to explain why I consider the classification of a West Indian creole as genetically derived from this or that "European" or other traditional language to be-on the basis of available evidence-unwarranted.