On the origin of Berbice Dutch VO: a substratist explanation
Denice Goddard, Hedde Zeijlstra
January 2009 

Intriguingly, Guyanese creole Berbice Dutch is a VO language, whereas both its substrate languages (Ijo languages, in particular Kalabari) and its superstrate (16th and 17th century Dutch) are OV (see Kouwenberg (1992)). Ever since the introduction of Bickerton’s bioprogram (Bickerton (1984) et seq), universalist creolists have taken Berbice Dutch to be a perfect illustration of VO as a default setting for basic word order. We argue that the VO emergence in Berbice Dutch directly results from the grammatical structure of Kalabari and 17th century Dutch and therefore counts as an argument against this universalist claim that Berbice Dutch word order must result from a UG default setting. Closer inspection on Kalabari and 17th century Dutch reveals (i) that, contrary to what has been assumed in. Kouwenberg (1992) and Lightfoot (2006), Kalabari does not exhibit any Verb Second effects and (ii) that 16th and 17th century Dutch still allowed VO object leakages. Given these facts, VO emergence in Berbice Dutch directly follows: First Kalabari had no movement causing VO in their native language. Since Kalabari had no way of recognizing the V2 property, Kalabari speakers learning Dutch must have misinterpreted Dutch VO surface strings and subsequently overgeneralized VO to all sentence types. Further input however did not lead Kalabari speakers to reject their initial VO hypothesis and adopt a more complex OV+V2 hypothesis as the VO overgeneralizations were in compliance with the existing Dutch VO leakages. Finally, this explains why Dutch planters adopted counterintuitive VO in depth orderings: those VO constructions were not considered fully ungrammatical in those days. This opened up the way for the next generation to interpret this linguistic input as VO with exceptional leakage to OV. With the loss of syntactic flexibility, finally, word order for Berbice Dutch was set on VO.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/000813 (please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000813)
Published in:	Amsterdam
keywords:	berbice dutch, substratism, universalism, vo/ov, creoles, syntax
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