Defining Creole

A conventional wisdom among creolists is that creole is a sociohistorical term only: that creole languages share a particular history entailing adults rapidly acquiring a language usually under conditions of subordination, but that structurally they are indistinguishable from other languages. The articles by John H. McWhorter collected in this volume demonstrate that this is in fact untrue. Creole languages, while complex and nuanced as all human languages are, are delineable from older languages as the result of their having come into existence only a few centuries ago. Then adults learn a language under untutored conditions, they abbreviate its structure, focusing upon features vital to communication and shaving away most of the features useless to communication that bedevil those acquiring the language non-natively. When they utilize their rendition of the language consistently enough to create a brand-new one, this new creation naturally evinces evidence of its youth: specifically, a much lower degree of the random accretions typical in older languages, which only develop over vast periods of time. The articles constitute a case for this thesis based on both broad, cross-creole ranges of data and focused expositions referring to single creole languages. The book presents a general case for a theory of language contact and creolization in which not only transfer from source languages but also structural reduction plays a central role, based on facts whose marginality of address in creole studies has arisen from issues sociopolitical as well as scientific. For several decades the very definition of the term creole has been elusive even among creole specialists. This book attempts to forge a path beyond the inter- and intra-disciplinary misunderstandings and stalemates that have resulted from this, and to demonstrate the place that creoles might occupy in other linguistic subfields, including typology, language contact, and syntactic theory.

A conventional wisdom among creolists is that creole is a sociohistorical term only: that creole languages share a particular history entailing adults rapidly acquiring a language usually under conditions of subordination, but that structurally they are indistinguishable from other languages. The articles by John H. McWhorter collected in this volume demonstrate that this is in fact untrue.

Creole languages, while complex and nuanced as all human languages are, are delineable from older languages as the result of their having come into existence only a few centuries ago. Then adults learn a language under untutored conditions, they abbreviate its structure, focusing upon features vital to communication and shaving away most of the features useless to communication that bedevil those acquiring the language non-natively. When they utilize their rendition of the language consistently enough to create a brand-new one, this new creation naturally evinces evidence of its youth: specifically, a much lower degree of the random accretions typical in older languages, which only develop over vast periods of time.

The articles constitute a case for this thesis based on both broad, cross-creole ranges of data and focused expositions referring to single creole languages. The book presents a general case for a theory of language contact and creolization in which not only transfer from source languages but also structural reduction plays a central role, based on facts whose marginality of address in creole studies has arisen from issues sociopolitical as well as scientific. For several decades the very definition of the term creole has been elusive even among creole specialists. This book attempts to forge a path beyond the inter- and intra-disciplinary misunderstandings and stalemates that have resulted from this, and to demonstrate the place that creoles might occupy in other linguistic subfields, including typology, language contact, and syntactic theory.

1. Defining Creole As A Synchronic Term -- 2. World's Simplest Grammars Are Creole Grammars -- 3. Rest Of The Story : Restoring Pidginization To Creole Genesis Theory -- 4. Saramaccan And Haitian As Young Grammars : The Pitfalls Of Syntactocentrism In Creole Genesis Research -- 5. Founder Principle Versus The Creole Prototype : Squaring Theory With Data -- 6. Looking Into The Void : Zero Copula In The Creole Mesolect -- 7. Diachrony Of Predicate Negation In Saramaccan Creole : Synchronic And Typological Implications -- 8. Sisters Under The Skin : A Case For Genetic Relationship Between The Atlantic English-based Creoles -- 9. Creole Transplantation : A Source Of Solutions To Resistant Anomalies -- 10. Creoles, Intertwined Languages, And Bicultural Identity -- 11. What Happened To English? -- 12. Inflectional Morphology And Universal Grammar : Post Hoc Versus Propter Hoc -- 13. Strange Bedfellows : Recovering The Origins Of Black English. John H. Mcwhorter. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 385-413) And Index. Gathers articles on creole languages and their origins, by John H McWhorter, a unique and often controversial scholar in the field. This book is of interest to scholars and students of creole and pidgin studies, and lingustics more broadly This volume gathers the last ten years worth of published articles on creole languages and their origins by John H. McWhorter, a unique and often controversial scholar in the field.