Reconciling Universalists and Substratists (ePub)

By way of an introduction to the following paper, I would like to draw here on a quote
taken from one of Salikoko Mufwene's essays: "...creolists generally agree on the nature of
the sociohistorical contexts which have produced these languages, but they disagree
essentially on the natures of the linguistic processes which resulted in them." (1986:129).
This sentence quite neatly captures what the general pidgin/creole-debate is all about.
The various approaches to pidginization and creolization and on how, i.e. by which
underlying processes, the respective language systems supposedly came into being have
this one thing in common: they all entail, respectively proceed from the assumption in the
first place, that they have something decisive to say about the nature of language in general.
Therefore the different positions are often defended most decidedly, trying, or so it seems,
to lay claim to a final definition of language in one or the other light. As such, I like to
describe this phenomenon as some kind of linguistic-philosophical debate. And this is what
the subject of the following paper shall be about: What are the various approaches, how
convincing are they, i.e., who has the best arguments or is able to disprove opposing views
best? In this sense, the following will be a theoretical rather than practical, case-study
paper. The discussion can be roughly described in terms of two major opposing viewpoints:
the universalist one and a more cognitive-oriented, functional-pragmatic. The latter is
called substratist for the most. The two camps tend to put either more weight on the
structural or the sociohistorical aspect respectively. It is especially the nativization phase,
known as creolization, which interests me most in this paper.

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