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Creole Genesis And Universality: Case, Word Order, And Agreement, Gerald Taylor Snow

Theses and Dissertations

The genesis of creole languages is important to the field of linguistics for at least two reasons. As newly emerging languages, creoles provide a unique window on the human language faculty and on the development of language generally (Veenstra 2008). They also offer insight into what are arguably universal linguistic structures. Two opposing theories have been in contention in the literature with respect to creole genesis: (1) that creoles owe their origin to the lexifier and substrate languages of their speech community and to other environmental influences (McWhorter 1997); and alternatively, (2) that universal innate linguistic structures or principles are …