It is often assumed that creole languages represent ‘exceptional’
language development in which a contact language or a variety largely spoken
by late L2 learners nativizes and becomes the main language of a community.
It is therefore not uncommon that scholars of contact languages or
revitalized languages (e.g., Hebrew) ask whether such languages are creoles
or not. The common assumption is that so-called creoles exhibit certain
specific linguistic features which distinguish them from other non-creolized
languages, and which could be used as a yardstick to evaluate the status of
other languages as creoles. But, what if any given language is a creolized
form of a pre-existing language spoken by previous generations? In this
paper, I argue that language acquisition always happens in a situation of
contact comparable to creole contexts, in which learners are faced with
heterogeneous inputs and recombine competing linguistic features into new
linguistic items. Under this view, all natural languages involve a hybrid
grammar. I further discuss how recombination leads to linguistic variation
both at the learner’s and population level.
Article outline
1.Introduction
2.Everyone speaks a creolized language
3.Language acquisition and creolization: Linguistic hybridism
4.Recombination of syntactic features
5.Capturing variation and constrains on variation during
recombination
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