GRAMMATICIZATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CREOLES
Grammaticization is an important component of the development of creoles, assuming (as I do) that there is no break in the transmission of the lexifier to the populations that developed these new vernaculars ("Population contacts and the evolution of English," EEM 2000). Grammaticization is a diachronic process and part of the several components of the restructuring (defined as 'system reorganization') that produced creoles from their lexifiers, assuming of course that creoles developed by the same processes that have driven language evolution anywhere (The ecology of language evolution). I argue in my work that grammaticization is neither rectilinear nor unilinear; like any structural change, it is subject to substrate influence under contact conditions. My essay "Creolization and grammaticization" (1996, in Changing meanings, changing functions, ed. by P. Baker & A. Syea) articulates these positions.