Defining Creole

by McWhorter, John H.

• ISBN13: 9780195166699
• ISBN10: 0195166698
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-02-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

John H. McWhorter earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University and is the author of two books on creole languages, Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis and The Missing Spanish Creoles. He has also written The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. In addition, he writes on race and culture for the New Republic and other publications and is the author of Losing the Race, Authentically Black, and Doing Your Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Part I: Is There Such a Thing as a Creole?	3	(158)
1. Defining "Creole" as a Synchronic Term	9	(29)
2. The World's Simplest Grammars Are Creole Grammars	38	(34)
3. The Rest of the Story: Restoring Pidginization to Creole Genesis Theory	72	(30)
4. Saramaccan and Haitian as Young Grammars: The Pitfalls of Syntactocentrism in Creole Genesis Research	102	(40)
5. The Founder Principle versus the Creole Prototype: Squaring Theory with Data	142	(19)
Part II: Is Creole Change Different from Language Change in Older Languages?	161	(100)
6. Looking into the Void: Zero Copula in the Creole Mesolect	167	(15)
7. The Diachrony of Predicate Negation in Saramaccan Creole: Synchronic and Typological Implications	182	(17)
8. Sisters under the Skin: A Case for Genetic Relationship between the Atlantic English-Based Creoles	199	(26)
9. Creole Transplantation: A Source of Solutions to Resistant Anomalies	225	(22)
10. Creoles, Intertwined Languages, and "Bicultural Identity"	247	(14)
Part III: The Gray Zone: The Cline of Pidginization or the Inflectional Parameter?	261	(106)
11. What Happened to English?	267	(45)
12. Inflectional Morphology and Universal Grammar: Post Hoc versus Propter Hoc	312	(25)
13. Strange Bedfellows: Recovering the Origins of Black English	337	(30)
Notes	367	(18)
References	385	(30)
Index	415