Emergent systematicity in Tây Bồi (Vietnamese Pidgin French)

Abstract

Early pidgins have been traditionally characterized as ‘fluid, structureless, and probably macaronic’ (Bickerton 1999: 54). According to this view, this unstructured code is only systematized when it is acquired by children during creolization. Presented here is a preliminary generative analysis of data from Tây Bồi/Vietnamese Pidgin French (VPF), a now-extinct pidgin which existed during the French colonization of Vietnam (Schuchardt 1888; Stageberg 1956; Reinecke 1968; Philips 1975; Nguyễn 1979; Love 2000). VPF was never acquired as an L1 nor fully elaborated; it therefore did not creolize, remaining unambiguously at the pidgin stage. Data from the 19th and 20th centuries suggest that, contrary to the predictions of the Bickertonian pidgin-to-creole model, VPF already exhibited a degree of grammatical systematicity. This poster explores the hypothesis that emergent systematicity in VPF grammar can be attributed to adult acquirers' overgeneralizations across the intake (Maximise Minimal Means; Biberauer 2019).