FROM OV TO VO - LINGUISTIC NEGOTIATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF BERBICE DUTCH CREOLE

Berbice Dutch Creole combines left-headedness and SVO order with features which are atypical of Caribbean creoles, such as sentence-final negation, postpositional structures, and aspectual suffixation. The order of constituents in the sentence and in other structures is an issue which has not received much attention in the study of Caribbean creole languages, presumably because there is no conflict between basic constituent order in the English-, French-, Spanish- and Portuguese-related creoles and their lexifiers. Such a conflict exists between Dutch and the Dutch-related creoles Negerhollands (of the US Virgin Islands; extinct), Skepi Dutch (of the Essequibo River area in Guyana; extinct), and Berbice Dutch Creole (of the Berbice River area in Guyana; nearly extinct): whereas SOV order underlies Dutch utterances, Dutch-related creoles invariably display SVO order (Bruyn and Veenstra in press). This article aims at reconstructing some of the developments which resulted in the combination of features displayed by Berbice Dutch Creole through a reconstruction of the choices available in the initial contact situation. Evidence from vocabulary, morphology, and syntax shows that these can best be accounted for as a linguistic compromise between two languages in contact, Dutch and Eastern-Ijo. It thus provides strong support for the relevance of Thomason and Kaufmans (1988) process of creole formation out of a crystallized pidgin formed through linguistic negotiation, a process which involves the exploitation of perceived similarities between the languages in contact. This has resulted in the continuity of properties which may be related to surface orderings rather than underlying structure in Dutch and Eastern-Ijo. At the same time, the lack of evidence for similar processes in the development of other Caribbean creole languages, calls the legitimacy of generalizations over processes of creole formation into question.