Paradigmatic restructuring: The case of Northern Indo-Portuguese Creoles

Good (2012) discusses the claim that ‘[t]he world’s most paradigmatically simplified grammars are jargonized grammars.’ In this contribution, I consider the process of paradigmatic restructuring resulting from jargonization from the perspective of Klein and Perdue’s (2002, 1997) notion of ‘basic variety’. Good’s concept of ‘jargonization bottleneck’ is recast as an instance of form selection constrained by frequency, lexical connections, and detectability in the process of naturalistic subsequent language acquisition. In this context, the case of verbal paradigm reduction in the northern Indo-Portuguese creoles is presented. Two recent developments in Korlai are also discussed: the addition of a fourth verb class and the creation of a new paradigm with ‘when’ conjunctions. This evidence shows that paradigmatic structure can and does again take form.