Avoiding bias in comparative creole studies: Stratification by lexifier and substrate

One major research question in creole studies has been whether the social/diachronic circumstances of the creolizaton processes are unique, and if so, whether this uniqueness of the evolution of creoles also leads to unique structural changes, which are reflected in a unique structural profile. Some creolists have claimed that indeed the answer to both questions is yes, e.g. Bickerton (1981), McWhorter (2001), and most recently Bakker et al. (2011) and Daval-Markussen (2014).

            To demonstrate the unique structural profile, these creolists have proposed that creoles share a set of “pan-creole” features. A unique structural profile implies that creoles are internally uniform through their pan-creole features and that they are externally distinctive with respect to non-creoles world-wide. But to show that creoles uniformly share pan-creole features, one does not only need to find a set of such features, but one also needs to examine a representative sample of creoles, i.e. a sample with historically and areally maximally independent languages. Sampling has been a very much discussed topic within typology (e.g. Dryer 1989, 1992; Rijkhoff & Bakker 1997; Perkins 2001; Bickel 2008; D. Bakker 2011), where it has been widely recognized that a biased picture can result if language samples contain languages that are not independent from each other, either because they are descended from a common ancestor or are neighbouring languages that may have influenced each other. Thus, one needs to control for genealogical and areal bias when looking for universal features in languages world-wide. However, in studies that look for creole universals, we still lack such a discussion of what a representative sample of creoles should look like.

            The present paper is an attempt to fill that gap by suggesting a new method for sampling in contact linguistics, which involves introducing the notion of bi-clan (a set of languages that share the same lexifier clan and substrate clan, where clan is a cover term for families and convergence areas).