Linguistic simplicity and complexity : why do languages undress? / by John H. McWhorter.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

In John McWhorter's Defining Creole anthology of 2005, his collected articles conveyed the following theme: His hypothesis that creole languages are definable not just in the sociohistorical sense, but in the grammatical sense. His publications since the 1990s have argued that all languages of the world that lack a certain three traits together are creoles (i.e. born as pidgins a few hundred years ago and fleshed out into real languages). He also argued that in light of their pidgin birth, such languages are less grammatically complex than others, as the result of their recent birth as pidgins. These two claims have been highly controversial among creolists as well as other linguists. In this volume, Linguistic Simplicityand Complexity, McWhorter gathers articles he has written since then, in the wake of responses from a wide range of creolists and linguists. These articles represent a considerable divergence in direction from his earlier work.

Print version record.

Machine generated contents note: I. Creole exceptionalism -- Introduction to Section I -- 1. The creole prototype revisited and revised -- 2.Comparative complexity: What the creolist learns from Cantonese and Kabardian -- 3. Reconstructing creole: Has "Creole Exceptionalism" been seriously engaged? -- II. Creole complexity -- Introduction to Section II -- 4. Oh, noo!: emergent pragmatic marking from a bewilderingly multifunctional word -- 5. Hither and thither in Saramaccan Creole -- 6.Complexity hotspot: The copula in Saramaccan -- III. Exceptional language change elsewhere -- Introduction to Section III -- 7. Why does a language undress? The Riau Indonesian problem -- 8. Affixless in Austronesian: Why Flores is a puzzle and what to do about it -- 9.A brief for the Celtic Hypothesis: English in Box 5?

eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - Worldwide