Pidgins and creoles

This chapter discusses pidgin and creole languages, that is languages that have emerged in contact situations in which second language acquisition has played a prominent role. It is shown that the creation of many of the morphosyntactic structures we find in these contact languages can be attributed to universal traits of SLA processing. Processability Theory is applied to pidgin and creole inflectional and syntactic structure and it turns out that this theory can help to explain the cross-linguistic similarity of the pertinent structures, and also the provenance of language-particular structures in these varieties.