10. Against Creole Exceptionalism (3) Creole formation is language acquisition plus social factors
So what is Creole? And what I'd like to do is to look at, say, what happens in the history of learning French by adults and by children. We saw examples of that before. But what we find there, and this is actually a very robust fact, which is that when you have people learning French, often-- so in the case of, say, object pronouns, they do produce structures of that sort. This doesn't have to be in the Creole environment. It happens in Marseilles, it happens in all kinds of varieties where you have second-language learning. So the idea is that often, as you learn the language, you might see a particular order, like subject, verb, object. If that order is the dominant order, often you take that order and you apply it to all the elements that might fit it. You overgeneralize. Children do that all the time. When children say things like, I have one foot and you have two foots. Saying "foot" and "foots" instead of saying "foot" and ...