Some Explanations that Strike Me as Incomplete

Off Target?

“…The related but crucially different concepts of markedness and naturalness (Mühlhäusler forthcoming), allied to the relative numerical strengths of speakers of all the languages represented among participants (including, in slave plantation societies and in contrast to what tends to be assumed by substratists, native speakers of the slave owners' language) and other relevant factors such as those mentioned earlier with respect to CPE and MC, may yet provide a basis for predicting which elements would be chosen in particular cases (cf. Mufwene 1989); but this has yet to be demonstrated. A further complication affecting the early development of an MFIC in slave plantation societies (but not necessarily limited to these) is that locally-born children who began to acquire a variety of the emergent MFIC as well as, or instead of, a parental language, must have brought whatever innate linguistic skills they possessed to the task.…”

Transfer and the Substrate Hypothesis in Creolistics

“…For instance, it must lead to a more charitable interpretation of Thomason's (1983) and Hagege's (1985) hypothesis that the features found in most Creoles lexified by Indo-European languages and inaccurately attributed to the putative bioprogram are actually features shared by many of the languages in contact. As shown in Mufwene (1989a), the features need not be shared by most of the languages; they simply must be less marked than other alternatives in the contact situation. Marked-ness itself is determined by formal typological kinship of the languages in contact, statistical dominance, salience, semantic transparency, simplicity (regarding form or combination of features encoded in a form), or a number of other relevant factors discussed in the literature on markedness.…”

“…33 Where conflict arises from the markedness values assigned to some features (e.g., when different factors identify a particular linguistic feature as both unmarked and marked), a weighting of factors may come into consideration. It may thus favor one of the factors, for example, semantic transparency (Seuren & Wekker, 1986), salience (Mufwene, 1989a), or invariance of form and/or free morphemes (Andersen, 1983). This seems to have been the case with tense-aspect delimitation strategies in the majority of Creoles; they generally selected the periphrastic strategy, which is more salient than other equally transparent systems such as agglutination or synthesis.…”

“…9. As noted in Mufwene (1989a), genesis has from the beginning been one of the central preoccupations of creolistics.…”