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Reply to Enoch Aboh’s rejoinder to my article on his book ‘The emergence of hybrid grammars’

Aboh was clearly not happy with my article inspired by his 2015 book (Bakker 2016a), even though it was mostly positive. It was not a review, but an article in which I evaluated the contents of the case study of the book on the basis of my views and findings of creolization as a world-wide phenomenon. My main problem with his book was that he focused his argumentation on one African language or language group of which he found some traces in one to three creole languages. I contest that this reasoning would be sufficient to explain the rather analytic properties of the small set of creoles he investigated, let alone structures of all creole languages. Other configurations of contributing languages should, in his model, give very different structural outcomes, but there is increasing evidence that the results of creolization all over the globe are strikingly similar, no matter which specific languages are involved in the ‘hybridization’ (see Bakker 2017 for a brief overview of 12 recent empirical feature pool studies, all showing the creoles in one corner of the typological space of the languages of the world, as a follow-up on Bakker et al. 2013). For that reason, I remain unconvinced by Aboh’s arguments highlighting solely Kwa/Gbe influence on Haitian and Surinamese creole language structures, also after his rejoinder, no matter how ‘in-depth’ the analyses of the selected structures are. Little substantial content remains in Aboh’s rejoinder. His numerous denigrating remarks about my reading of his book create a misleading picture of my review. I do not see on the basis of what Aboh writes in his rejoinder that I have misrepresented his views or misunderstood his theory. I stand by the contents of my article. Gbe influence can be shown in creoles, but it is surprisingly marginal (cf. the clear results in Muysken & Smith 2015, a revealing book to which Aboh contributed; see my review, Bakker 2016b). Gbe influence really cannot be invoked to explain the overwhelmingly analytic structures of the three creoles that Aboh deals with, let alone the ca. 100 other known creoles of the world. His objections relate to trivial details rather than major issues. Just like his book and his rejoinder, my article was not flawless. I admit that I had missed that Gungbe has a topic marker. However, I also argued that Saramaccan dé/dέ is not a topic marker, but what Aboh calls a reinforcer, which received no comment. If Fongbe was not a major language in the Allada Kingdom, it was certainly a minor language and no doubt another Gbe language would have been a major one. I said