Negative Concord in Creole Languages: Commonality and Variation in the Perspective of Bickerton’s Legacy

International audience In his groundbreaking 1981 book /Roots of Language/ Dereck Bickerton was amongst the first linguist to propose a list of properties hypothesized to be common to all creole languages. While this list of properties has sometimes inspired research promoting creole languages as unique, Bickerton’s original view should better be understood as a claim that these properties were possibly universal properties of language at least abstractly and as such instantiated the roots of all languages, not just creole ones. In my contribution here, I will revisit and reassess Bickerton’s observations about the generality of negative concord as a common property of creole languages and beyond, sorting out what remains of his legacy in this domain from what has been discovered since then about the nature of negation and negative dependencies in creole languages. I will base myself more specifically on a detailed comparison of the French based creoles, but appeal as well to other ones to confirms patterns discovered there or complete them with additional possibilities.