Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins: What’s the Metric?
نویسنده
چکیده
This review article is a response to the way the editors of and contributors to Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins respond to McWhorter’s (2001) claim that creoles have the world’s simplest grammars. Although I agree with the contributors that creoles are not as simple as they may look to some, I express several concerns about the ways they (fail to) raise and/or address some fundamental issues regarding the subject matter. These include discussing what the notions simplicity and complexity really mean as they are applied to languages and whether linguistics has yet developed the necessary metric(s) for assessing complexity without biasing the issues in favor of or against particular types of languages. My arguments are intended to prompt linguists to think harder over how we can contribute to the scholarship on complexity as related to emergence, thinking of languages as emergent multi-modular phenomena, internally and externally interactive, always in the state of flux, and in search of (transient) equilibrium.
منابع مشابه
Paradigmatic complexity in pidgins and creoles
The last decade has seen increasing attention paid to questions of grammatical complexity, in particular regarding the extent to which some languages can be said to be more “complex” than others, whether globally or with respect to particular subsystems. Creoles have featured prominently in these debates, with various authors arguing that they are particularly simple when set against noncreoles...
متن کاملYou calls it jannying, we calls it mummering – but what do they call it? New and old constraints on verbal -s
The variable realisation of verbal -s has been investigated in a large number of English varieties, including traditional dialects as well as pidgins and creoles (see Clarke 1997 and van Herk & Walker 2005 for literature reviews). Its use is commonly associated with habituality, contrasting with the non-habitual bare form. However, a number of syntactic constraints, chiefly among them the North...
متن کاملSocial evolution and language change
We propose substantive universals in the relationship between social evolution and language change. Social anthropologists have categorized societies into roughly four broad types by social organization: bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. This classification is evolutionary in the sense that the society types arose in human history in the sequence given above. We compare these society types t...
متن کاملThe Evolution of Language: Hints from Creoles and Pidgins
The subtitle of this essay should not be interpreted in the way suggested by Bickerton (1990, 1995, 2002) or Givón (1998). Creoles can inform our research on the evolution of language not because there is anything empirically exceptional or unusual about the way they emerged (see, e.g., DeGraff 2003, 2005) but because the multitude of facts that we have learned over the past couple of decades a...
متن کامل