Language Acquisition in Creolization and, Thus, Language Change: Some Cartesian- Uniformitarian Boundary Conditions

1 Background and Objectives 1.1 Terminological and conceptual preliminaries: ‘Creoles’, ‘Creole genesis’, ‘Creolization’, etc. 1.2 Uniformitarian boundary conditions 1.3 Cartesian boundary conditions 1.4 Some landmarks for navigating through the many detours of this long essay 2 Whence ‘Creole Genesis’? 2.1 Making constructive use of the distinction and relation between ‘I-languages’ and ‘E-languages’ 2.1.1 The ontological priority of I-languages (and innovations therein) 2.1.2 ‘E-creoles’ vs. ‘I-creoles’ 2.1.3 Findings about E-creoles and I-creoles complement each other 2.1.4 I-languages as ‘linguistic fingerprints’: no two idiolects are identical 2.1.5 Abrupt ‘innovations’ precede gradual ‘spread’ 2.2 Deconstructing ‘gradualism’ 2.2.1 Gradual ‘change’ in E-language reduces to abrupt steps in I-languages 2.2.2 Gradualism in acquisition, in creolization and in age-grading effects 2.2.3 The roles of children and adults vis-à-vis innovations and the spread thereof 2.3 On the formation of ‘I-creoles’ via parameter-(re)setting in I-languages – as in other cases of language change 2.3.1 ‘Poverty of the stimulus’ arguments and ‘the logical problem of language acquisition’ 2.3.2 ‘Poverty of the stimulus’ in the colonial Caribbean: a ‘sharp break in transmission’? 2.3.3 English ‘out-creoles’ Haitian Creole 2.3.4 Caribbean Creoles are genetically related to European languages according to the Comparative Method 2.3.5 Nonlinguistic confounds in the application of the Comparative Method to Creole languages