Creoles as interlanguages : Inflectional morphology

The new millenium has seen a revival of the idea that processes of second language acquisition (SLA) are a crucial ingredient to creole genesis. Traditionally, the fields of SLA and pidgin and creole studies have cross-fertilized each other and there have been different periods in which one of the two fields eagerly looked at the results emerging in the other field in order to find something that might improve the understanding of one’s own problems.2 It is, however, still controversial which kinds of interlanguage processes are relevant, and how much, or which of, a given creole’s structure can be attributed to such processes. Furthermore, much of the discussion has centered around the question of transfer, which, as we will see, is an unwarranted narrowing of perspective. Recent volumes such as Kouwenberg & Patrick (2003), Lefebvre et al. (2006), Siegel