The genesis of creole languages is important to the field of linguistics for at least two reasons. As newly emerging languages, creoles provide a unique window on the human language faculty and on the development of language generally (Veenstra 2008). They also offer insight into what are arguably universal linguistic structures. Two opposing theories have been in contention in the literature with respect to creole genesis: (1) that creoles owe their origin to the lexifier and substrate languages of their speech community and to other environmental influences (McWhorter 1997); and alternatively, (2) that universal innate linguistic structures or principles are the generative source of creole grammar (Bickerton 1981). Both theories have a claim to at least partial correctness. This thesis adds new evidence in support of the universalist/innatist argument. This thesis examines five written creole languages and two signed creole languages of geographic and historical diversity and focuses on the grammatical system of case, word order, and agreement of these languages as one axis along which to investigate the issue of creole genesis and universality. The signed languages in particular offer unique data, especially the data from Nicaraguan Sign Language, where there was an absence of significant lexifier and substrate influences. Patterns of what are termed core indispensable features in these seven language systems are uncovered, examined and compared. Further comparison is made with the case, word order, and agreement features of the world's languages generally and of creole languages as a subset of the world's languages, based on data in the World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2009) and in the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (Michaelis et al. 2013b), respectively. The findings and contributions to the field made possible from the data in this thesis are that there are commonalities in the case, word order, and agreement systems of the subject creole languages that qualify as core indispensable features and that these features are generated by universal innate linguistic expectations. These commonalities are: (1) that morphological case inflection is not a core indispensable feature; (2) that SVO word order is a core indispensable feature; and (3) that agreement as a feature, seen only when word order is apparently verb final, occurs only in the signed creole languages and is more accurately interpreted as topicalization incorporated into SVO word order rather than as an independent core feature. Nicaraguan Sign Language presents especially compelling evidence for these conclusions.

Early in the genesis of Mauritian Creole (MC), the quantificational determiners of its lexifier language, French, incorporated into a large number of the nouns that they combined with, resulting in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions, yielding (in)definite, singular, plural and generic interpretations. These early changes were accompanied by the loss all inflectional morphology, as well as the loss of the French copula, and that of the Case assigning prepositions à ('of') and de ('of') which are used in partitive and genitive constructions respectively. I argue that these changes triggered a parametric shift in noun denotation, from predicative in French to argumental in MC, and account for the fact that MC has a very different determiner system from its lexifier. My analysis is motivated by both Longobardi's (1994) claim that only DPs can be arguments, NPs cannot, and Chierchia's (1998b) seemingly incompatible claim that N can be an argument when it is Kind denoting. I provide detailed account of the emergence of the new MC determiners, from their first attestations in the early 18th century, to the end of the 19th century, when the determiner system settles into a form that is still used today. Following an analysis of the modern MC determiner system, I propose that MC nouns are lexically stored as argumental, Kind denoting terms, which share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals, such as their ability to occur in argument positions without a determiner. The new quantificational determiners are analyzed as 'type shifting operators' that shift Kinds and predicate nominals into argumental noun phrases. The singular indefinite article enn and the plural marker bann assign existential quantification over instances of Kind denoting count nouns, and the null definite determiner is an operator that quantifies over the totality of a set. The differential behaviour of MC count vs. mass nouns is accounted for in terms of the Number argument which must be realized for common count nouns. Some seemingly 'bare' nouns comprise a phonologically null definite determiner equivalent to French le/la and English the. Subject-object asymmetry of count nouns in MC provides evidence for the occurrence of this null element which requires licensing in certain syntactic environments. The Specificity marker la, which serves to mark anaphoric definiteness, is shown to be a 'last resort' means of licensing the null definite determiner. My syntactic analysis is within Chomsky's (1995b) Minimalist framework and a Formal Semantics (Partee 1986), both of which stipulate legitimate operator variable constructions. The loss of the French quantificational determiners, and that of the copula meant that early MC lacked overt sources of quantification at both the nominal and clausal levels. In my analysis of the emerging MC determiner system, I look at the new sources of quantification that arise in order to establish the referential properties of nouns, and I show how these various strategies are linked to the means by which the semantic features of Definiteness, Deixis, Number and Specificity are expressed, and also the means by which the syntactic function of predication is realized.