Defining Creole

by McWhorter, John H.

• ISBN13: 9780195166705
• ISBN10: 0195166701
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-02-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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. The articles fall into roughly three categories: defending his hypothesis that creole languages are synchronically distinguishable from older grammars, addressing the intersection between creole genesis and language change, and lastly countering the accepted argument that creoles' differences from their source languages (called lexifiers) are simply a matter of inflection. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of creole and pidgin studies, and lingustics more broadly.

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 Typolozical 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