A paper by Professor Marlyse Baptista, titled "Competition, selection, and the role of congruence in Creole genesis and development,” was published in the March 2020 issue of the journal Language.
The paper focuses on the role of convergence/congruence in Creole formation and development, using a competition and selection framework. The proposal is that the similarities (the congruent features) that speakers perceive between the languages in contact are favored to participate in the emergence and development of a new language. Specifically, the paper illustrates how morphosyntactic and semantic features are more likely to be selected into the grammatical makeup of a given Creole when they preexist and are shared by some of the source languages present in its linguistic ecology. This is empirically supported in this paper by numerous case studies and a survey of congruent features in 20 contact languages across 19 grammatical and lexical domains. In order to show how congruence operates, the author proposes a model of matter and pattern mapping, adapted to the multilingual setting in which Creole languages emerge.
