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 Guest column

Case closed?
Testing the feature pool hypothesis

John McWhorter
Columbia University

1. Introduction

One of the prime attractions of scientific inquiry is the discovery of the counter-
intuitive. As such, the idea that creole genesis entails simply a mixture between
languages, with simplification playing no significant role, is intriguing. The impli-
cation is that the traditional sense of what a ‘creole’ is has been an illusion.
Thus it is not surprising that the ‘feature pool’ analysis of creole genesis, most
often supported by Mufwene (2001 and other works), adopted of late by Enoch
Aboh (e.g. 2009) and Umberto Ansaldo (e.g. 2009), and regularly cited by most
other creolists, is so readily accepted. It is an elegant idea, and even more attractive
in paralleling biological reproduction.
However, the ‘feature pool’ hypothesis does not, in the end, account for the
body of data that it addresses. An opposing idea is that creole genesis involves not
only mixture, but also considerable simplification of grammars, to a degree far
beyond what grammars undergo naturally, under contact or not.
Conventional wisdom in creole studies would appear to be that this hypoth-
esis, which I unhesitantly term Creole Exceptionalism, has been refuted. I would
like to explain why I do not believe this to be the case.
The ‘feature pool’ hypothesis (henceforth FP) fares beautifully as an idea, but
much less so as a mechanism. Creole studies would benefit from a careful evalua-
tion of this paradigm before judging it correct.

2. Spelling out terms

It is certainly correct when creolists cite the FP to show that creoles acquired most
of their features from their source languages, along the lines of, for example, Siegel
(2008). However, the basic hybridity of creoles is, in itself, obvious to all. Spelling

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27:1 (2012), 171–182.  doi 10.1075/jpcl.27.1.07mcw
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172 John McWhorter

it out, in terms of the intellectual history of creole studies, is significant as a stand-

ing riposte to Bickerton’s (1981) peculiar claim that resemblances between creoles
and their substrate languages are accidental. FP adherents are claiming something
more specific, and interesting, than merely that creoles have lexifier and substrate
features.
Specifically, writers like Siegel — without espousing my particular take on
these issues — assume that creoles develop amidst not only mixture, but also sim-
plificatory strategies symptomatic of second language acquisition. In contrast, FP
stipulates — challenging decades of work relating creoles to pidgins, foreigner
talk, second language acquisition, ‘weak’ parameter settings, etc. — that creoliza-
tion has nothing significant to do with simplification.
One of FP adherents’ main objections today, for example, is the Creole Excep-
tionalism framework, which assumes that creolization involves languages mixing,
but with source language structures quite often rendered in an abbreviated form.
Specifically, Creole Exceptionalism stipulates that compared to the languages in
its feature pool, creoles have less 1) overspecification of semantic categories (such
as noun class or tense gradation), 2) structural elaboration (consonant gradations,
split ergativity), and 3) irregularity (for the most extensive discussion of these met-
rics, cf. McWhorter 2007: 21–35). We can illustrate the schema thus:

→ ←

Under FP, creolization is instead a hybridization, leaving overall complexity in-

tact. FP adherents allow a certain streamlining in the process, such as Aboh &
Ansaldo’s (2007) speculation about ‘altered replication’ in which inflections with
‘low’ semantic content are less likely to be transferred. However, a notable quote
is Aboh’s (2009: 340) that ‘The claim that creoles are simplified versions of their
sources is a fallacy, just as it would be to claim in biology that hybrids are geneti-
cally simplified children of their parents’. It is fair to illustrate the working schema
of FP thus:

→ ←

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 Case closed? 173

The FP certainly does not stipulate that the mixture occurs randomly. The idea is
that a competition between features is decided on the basis of prominence, trans-
parency, frequency, salience, and typological similarity. However, these features
determine language contact in general, as conclusively taxonomized in Thoma-
son & Kaufman’s (1988) foundational thesis, and further elucidated in summary
language contact sources such as Winford (2002) and Matras (2009). This means
that FP adherents are arguing that qualitatively, nothing significant distinguishes
the birth of Sranan Creole from that of Romanian. In both cases, languages came
together, tout court.
Counterintuitive and contradicting several decades of research on language
change and language contact, this is a radical proposition. As such, it requires
rigorous demonstration. Has this happened?

3. Argumentation

A signature FP argument is Aboh (2009), who characterizes creolization as ‘the

spell-out of a specific recombination of linguistic genotypes’ (325). His article
makes that case with two Sranan items, arguing that the word for eat combines the
semantics of Gungbe and the syntax of English and Gungbe, while the agentive
marker -man mirrors both English and Gungbe. ‘The conclusion of this paper is
obvious: the notion of simplicity is completely irrelevant to the understanding of
the structure and genesis of creole languages’, Aboh concludes (340). But certainly,
so bold a conclusion cannot stand on two morphemes.
We are to assume that Aboh’s conclusion is founded on work beyond the
article as well, and indeed a more comprehensive argument is Aboh & Ansaldo
(2007), applying the FP framework to the Sranan noun phrase and to Sri Lanka
Malay. However, this article does not fare better as a demonstration that simplicity
is ‘completely irrelevant’ to creole genesis. Plag (2011) does not support my ‘ex-
ceptionalist’ conviction, but his recent demonstrations (2008a, 2008b) that creoles
are the product of second language acquisition are quite consonant with my views,
and he provides a detailed and conclusive deconstruction of Aboh & Ansaldo
(2007), showing that the data submit more gracefully to an account entailing ab-
breviation in addition to mixture.
For example, Aboh & Ansaldo note that Surinam creoles’ noun phrases pattern
syntactically according to English but semantically according to Gbe and assert in
passing that this pattern could not result from acquisitional processes — but Plag
shows that it falls naturally out of, precisely, regular patterns of second language
acquisition. Or, Plag notes that their stipulation of ‘reassemblage’ and ‘recombina-
tion’ is unsystematized, qualifying as description rather than explanation. Finally,

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174 John McWhorter

Aboh & Ansaldo characterize the absence of a plural affix in Surinam creoles to
plurality being ‘semantically vacuous’, an analysis that would surprise most lin-
guists, including those who, as Plag notes, classify the plural as inherent morphol-
ogy, carrying meaning in contrast to contextual morphology (e.g. concord) which
does not.
Plag notes these kinds of problems throughout the article — as well as inac-
curacies in data — and the conclusion is inescapable that Aboh & Ansaldo (2007)
does not make a successful case for the FP. A search for more successful argu-
mentation will certainly lead to the work of FP’s founder, Mufwene. Here, how-
ever, while we have eminently useful statement of the FP’s assumptions, there is no
more actual demonstration with data than in the previously cited sources.
For example, Mufwene (2009: 375) treats the usage of for as both a comple-
mentizer and modal in many creoles as what he terms a ‘showpiece’ of FP argu-
mentation. That argument, typical in form of Mufwene’s FP work in general (e.g.
Mufwene 2001), is enlightening in itself — but in the post-Bickertonian sense I
alluded to above. As an argument for FP, this kind of argument is fundamentally
incomplete. All agree that mixture plays a major role in creole genesis. Our ques-
tion is whether simplification does not. Demonstrations of the mixed origins of a
few items cannot answer that question — nor even could dozens of such demon-
strations, any more than dry patches of land between puddles could demonstrate
that it had not rained.

4. Applicability

What happens, for example, when we try to apply the FP to even a creole grammar
as a whole? Palenquero Creole Spanish is a useful case. It was born from a feature
pool provided by just two languages, Spanish and Kikongo (cf. Schwegler 1996).
Kikongo is not analytic as the Kwa language contributors to so many creoles are.
Rather, Kikongo and Spanish have quite a bit in common, both richly inflected
and SVO:
Kikongo (Bentley 1887: 526) (C8P = noun class 8 plural):
(1) O ma-tadi ma-ma ma-mpembe ma-mpwena
AUG C8P-stone C8P-DEM C8P-white C8P-big
i ma-u ma-ma tw-a-mw-ene.
COP C8P-that C8P-DEM we-them-see-PERF.
Spanish:
(2) Est-a-s piedr-a-s grand-e-s y blanc-a-s
DEM-FEM-PL stone-FEM-PL big-FEM-PL and white-FEM-PL

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 Case closed? 175

son las que hemos visto.

COP.3P DEF.FEM.PL REL have.1PL see.PP
‘These great white stones are those which we have seen’.

We will assume that under an FP analysis, whatever determines how a creole

chooses between alternate syntactic or semantic strategies that source languages
present, most certainly a creole will inherit what both languages share. This is be-
cause presumably, within the feature pool in question these features were among
the more prominent, transparent, frequent, and salient, and certainly were not
blocked by typological dissimilarity. To wit, FP predicts the following:
1. Palenquero will have ample noun phrase concordial marking;
2. Palenquero will mark number regardless of definiteness or animacy;
3. Palenquero will have either a definite article like Spanish or a typical Ban-
tu ‘augment’ marker like Kikongo (the initial o above), which has a similar
function;
4. Palenquero will distinguish the perfect from the past, as do both Spanish and
Kikongo (nsumbidi ‘i have bought’, yasumba ‘I bought’);
5. Palenquero will have Differential Object Marking, marking human objects dif-
ferently than others, as does Spanish with a (Besó a Carlos ‘She kissed Charles’)
and Kikongo, like all Bantu languages, in indexing dislocated human objects
with an object prefix (Bentley 1887: 670).
None of these predictions are borne out.
Palenquero has no concordial marking. It has no definite article, no Differen-
tial Object Marking, nor does its tense system include marking of the perfect in
contrast to the past (Schwegler 1998). It marks number only in the definite and
more favorably with animates (Schwegler & Green 2007).
Affixation? Under the FP, the fact that many of the features were encoded with af-
fixes cannot explain their absence in Palenquero. Mufwene (2009: 393) notes that
in creolization, often ‘alternative strategies have been adopted in lieu of inflections’
and even that in some cases, ‘even new distinctions have been introduced’. Muf-
wene is correct, but in a sense that presents a conundrum for the FP. How does
the FP explain why Palenquero did not reproduce these affixes’ functions in free
morphemes, even when both languages offered the features?
Competitiveness? Aboh & Ansaldo (2007: 101) surmise that concord ‘may not
be competitive enough’ to enter a feature pool. But given how very much con-
cord both languages offered, and even with the very same functions, upon what
grounds do we specify that concord in this particular feature pool was ‘uncompeti-
tive’? Might we not expect at least a masculine/feminine distinction? And again,

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176 John McWhorter

if not as affixes, then as free morphemes along the lines of noun classifiers in so
many languages worldwide?
Crucial: Palenquero does retain one Kikongo noun class marker, ma-, as its
plural-marking clitic. But this only leaves more questions that the FP is not de-
signed to answer. First, why the restriction to the definite and the animate? I pro-
pose that this traces to simplification: diachronically, animate definite is typically
where plural marking begins in a language that did not have it before (McWhorter
2006: 171). Why the plural but not gender? Plag, as well as Kihm (2003) and myself
(2011), would refer to creolization preserving inherent inflection (e.g. number)
but eliminating the contextual (e.g.concord). As of now, FP adherents can refer
only to their sense of what is ‘semantically vacuous’ — which under their analysis
would include rather than exclude the plural marker.
Moreover, even if they were to add the contextual/inherent distinction as a
software ‘update’, it would be of no help in explaining why Palenquero has no defi-
nite determiner or perfect tense.
Nativization? FP adherents might object that the framework does account for di-
vergences from feature pool sources, referring to arguments by Veenstra (2006)
and Kouwenberg (2009) that such divergences are due to later nativization by chil-
dren. These arguments, solid as genesis arguments in general, cannot help us here.
No account of nativization encompasses the elimination of concord, articles and
Differential Object Marking, the narrowing of the scope of number marking, and
eliminating grades of past tense distinction. Nor, obviously, do these losses submit
to analysis as subsequent grammaticalizations, along the lines of Mufwene (1996).
Palenquero’s divergences from Spanish and Kikongo simply do not fit any concep-
tion of the FP.
Other languages in the pool? The only thing that could possibly help an FP account
is that Palenquero was likely seeded by a form of Portuguese pidgin or creole,
relexified by Spanish (Schwegler 1998: 229–30); cf. a famous comment by Father
Alonso Sandoval that at least some of the first slaves spoke a ‘broken’ variety called
‘the language of Sao Tomé’. Sao Tomense Creole Portuguese is quite similar to
Palenquero in lacking the five features above, and thus one might suppose that
Palenquero incorporated ‘features’ from some form of this Sao Tomé variety as
well as from Spanish and Kikongo.
It must be clear that the Portuguese element in Palenquero consists of a small
collection of morphemes; it is unlikely that the Portuguese pidgin/creole was a
robust presence in the genesis context. However, even if it was, and the Palen-
quero feature pool was thus composed of Spanish, Kikongo, and a Sao Tomé
Portuguese pidgin/creole, the FP account again founders. For one, if this ‘broken’
Sao Tomé variety was a pidgin, then given Mufwene’s frequent dissociation of

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 Case closed? 177

pidgin-level varieties from creole genesis, under FP this variety was irrelevant in
any case.
However, even supposing it was not, this Sao Tomé pidgin/creole would have
been just one among three contributors to the feature pool, and the other two were
more typologically similar to one another than to it. Why, then, would features
from Sao Tomense be processed as more prominent, transparent, frequent, and
salient — or more typologically compatible with the creators’ native Kikongo? A
conception of a competition between a Romance language, a Bantu one, and a
Sao Tomense Portuguese pidgin or creole in which the result is Palenquero could
never be judged predictive or systematic. Why was the Sao Tomé variety a kind of
‘strange attractor’ if creole genesis is simply a mixture of features?
The implications must be clear. It is starkly obvious that any empirical account
of Palenquero’s birth from a pool of features must pay as much attention to what
Palenquero did not incorporate from its feature pool as to what it did. This means,
quite simply, a creole genesis model with an ‘exceptionalist’ component. That is,
my argument is not that the FP is mistaken, but that it is incomplete.
Significantly, Palenquero is not a fluke but a norm, paralleled by Guinea-Bis-
sau Creole Portuguese’s analyticity despite its emergence in a feature pool of Por-
tuguese and well-inflected West Atlantic languages, and Nubi Creole Arabic’s only
faint grammatical resemblance to either Arabic or Nilo-Saharan languages, and, in
fact, most if not all creole languages. If it is true that as Aboh has put it ‘the claim
that creoles are simplified versions of their sources is a fallacy’, FP adherents have
yet to demonstrate it.

5. Engagement with challenges

Something else renders the FP a highly preliminary proposal. Namely, its adher-
ents have yet to engage substantially with counter-arguments.
An example comes from Saramaccan, whose determining substrate language
was Fongbe. In McWhorter (2004), I noted nine Fongbe features that surpass
Saramaccan equivalents in complexity as defined in the Introduction, even when
the Saramaccan one is modelled on the Fongbe one, and that it seems impossible
to compose a like list of Saramaccan features more complex than Fongbe equiva-
lents. McWhorter (2001) notes several features that creoles regularly fail to incor-
porate from their feature pools, most of which would not fall under the contextual
inflection ‘update’ mentioned above, such as Central Philippines languages’ focus
marking in the Philippines Creole Spanishes (expressed in part with a free mor-
pheme), and evidential markers in creolized Chinook Jargon, whose source lan-

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178 John McWhorter

guages were rich with them. Short of an FP account, we must conclude that Creole
Exceptionalism explains these facts better.
Supporting that verdict is that FP argumentation tends to evade the indica-
tions of simplification in creole genesis. ‘We must wonder’, Mufwene (2009: 393–4)
briefly notes in a footnote followed by a brief passage, why creoles tend to eliminate
redundancy, proposing that the loss is due to unspecified ‘cross-systemic or intra-
systemic interactional pressures’. But this vastly minimizes the challenge: there is
a great deal more than redundancy that creoles do not choose from their feature
pool. Similarly, Ansaldo & Nordhoff (2009: 354) mention — again, in a footnote
— the absence of inflections in Chinook Jargon (which, as noted above, creolized)
as requiring ‘alternative explanation’. However, the Chinook Jargon problem is but
an isolated symptom, of a profound incompatibility between creole language data
as a whole and the FP paradigm.
Adherents of a framework with promise eagerly take on challenging data in
detail. As long as this is anything less than standard procedure among adherents
of FP, the hypothesis can qualify only as tentative. (Kouwenberg 2010 on Parkvall
2008, although I do not support its conclusions, is an exception — that proves the
rule.) Surpassing that tentaive status will require detailed response not only to
arguments here and elsewhere, but to new ones bolstering Parkvall (2008), such as
Bakker, Daval-Markussen, Parkvall, & Plag (2011).

6. Explanatory value to language contact theory

Finally, FP creates a theoretical conundrum: explaining the difference between

creoles and intertwined or ‘mixed’ languages like Media Lengua, which combines
Spanish lexicon with full reproduction of Quechua morphology and syntax. If cre-
oles are simply mixtures, then how does FP explain that Quechua morphosyntax is
reproduced so faithfully in Media Lengua in contrast to how much less so Kikongo
morphosyntax is in Palenquero, or Kwa morphosyntax is in Saramaccan or Haitian?
I propose that the difference between Fongbe’s contribution to Saramaccan
and Quechua’s to Media Lengua was that Saramaccan began as a pidgin-level ren-
dition of both English, Portuguese and Fongbe, and flowered anew as a different
language. If this is a mistake and Saramaccan was instead the result of a simple
mingling of linguistic chromosomes and ‘That’s All’, as Aboh puts it in the title of
his 2009 article, then the FP framework must explain why, for example, the min-
gling was so much less modular in Saramaccan. Why is Saramaccan not a combi-
nation of English and Portuguese lexicon with Fongbe’s derivational affixes as well
as its two unbound case markers? Or why is Palenquero not a Spanish lexicon with
Kikongo’s battery of noun class prefixes or postverbal derivational suffixes?

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 Case closed? 179

7. Unintended consequences

Finally, I suggest that creolists consider two implications of the FP that are not
deliberate, but demand attention nonetheless.
First, the FP suggests a watchcry: The proper goal of the study of creole lan-
guages is to demonstrate that there is nothing especially interesting about them. I
submit that this is a distinctly peculiar and uninspiring mission. Under the FP,
upon what linguistic grounds do we treat these languages we have called ‘creoles’
as the subject of a journal, conferences, and anthology volumes? Is creole studies,
as Parkvall (2001: 150) asked, ‘cutting off the branch it is sitting on?’
Of course, the fact that a hypothesis is less ‘dramatic’ does not render it false.
Chomskyan syntacticians, presented with the radically streamlined machinery of
Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff ’s ‘Simpler Syntax’ paradigm, have objected
that ‘if this approach is right, then syntax isn’t interesting’ (Culicover & Jackendoff
2005: 540). Yet all indications are that Simpler Syntax is closer to truth than the
ingrown, semiempirical mechanisms of Minimalism. In the same way, the fact that
FP eliminates creoles as a legitimate subject of inquiry cannot, in itself, prejudice
us against it. However, given that the FP is a call to eliminate a linguistic subfield,
we will presumably accept it only upon rigorous assessment of its logical validity.
Second, the FP entails, inherently, an insult to many creolist scholars.
The insult is, ironically, the product of what is considered an enlightened re-
sponse. In examining solid descriptions of older languages such as Manambu of
Papua New Guinea (Aikhenvald’s 2008), Jarawara of the Amazon (Dixon 2004),
or even analytic ones like Sino-Tibetan Lahu (Matisoff 1973) one cannot help but
perceive much more overspecification, structural elaboration, and irregularity
than has been described in any creole language. Aboh & Smith (2009) and Muf-
wene’s (2009: 387–90) warnings about the pitfalls of assessing languages according
to ‘bit complexity’ are well taken. However, they do not belie the stark contrast to
which I refer, once referred to by Bickerton (1988: 318) as ‘elusive’ but obvious.
This contrast cannot help but strike anyone, regardless of their views about FP
or Creole Exceptionalism. The question is not whether that difference exists, but
what we attribute it to.
FP encourages a choice here that creates the insult in question. Namely, we are
to suppose that creolists have yet to describe creoles well enough to show that they
are as complex as older languages (e.g. Arends 2001). However, this is a trenchant
and dismissive judgment of the many creolists who have granted us detailed gram-
mars of creole languages and articles about aspects of their structural makeup.
Short of embracing this uncivility, we must allow that these scholars’ descriptions
have been accurate.

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180 John McWhorter

This, however, requires acknowledging that creole genesis is not only a matter
of selections from a feature pool, but also a robustly simplificatory process, result-
ing in languages less accreted with needless elaboration than older ones.

8. Conclusion

FP, in beginning with something as obvious as that creoles are born amidst mix-
ture, can seem so reasonable in itself that the slippage between it and the facts can
be counterintuitive. However, that slippage is vast. A seemingly unexceptionable
statement such as this one (Mufwene 2009: 386):
‘The extent of morphological complexity (in terms of range of distinctions) re-
tained by a ‘contact language’ largely reflects the morphological structures of the
target language and the particular languages that it came in contact with’.

is, when applied to creole languages, false.

A theory of creole genesis must account for that statement’s falsity, and that is
the aim of the Creole Exceptionalism approach. The FP argument has been stated
with lapidary articulateness, especially by Mufwene, but much less successfully
demonstrated. At this date, FP can neither be treated as canon nor presented as
such to linguists beyond creole studies.
Surely FP adherents will refine their hypothesis. However, if in doing so, they
continue to step around evidence that creolization entails abbreviation, one might
be pardoned in seeing something almost cultish in the endeavor. A person might
deny the force of gravity, and artfully treat the fact that what goes up must come
down as a minor theoretical hair out of place, to be examined at some future date.
Most would take the evidence as suggesting that gravity is in fact a pervasive real-
ity, and deem the alternate hypothesis as clever but unsustainable.
As currently presented, that is the verdict we must apply to the FP.

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Author’s address
John McWhorter
Columbia University
Slavic Department
708 Hamilton Hall
New York, NY 10027
jhmcw5@yahoo.com

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