To browse Academia. London: Battlebridge, Recent attempts to prove the simplicity of Creoles with respect to non-Creoles have, like preceding ones concentrated on describing the assumed paucity of selected surfacephenomena in quantitative terms.
None of these accounts has taken into consideration that typically, Creoles are languages in contact. In the multilingual speech communities of West Africa but equally so in other regions, Creoles are in contact with lexifier superstrates, with historically unrelated non-lexifier superstrates and with a host of adstrate and substrate languages. This paper attempts to provide answers to two questions. Th is paper discusses the possibility of quantifying complexity in languages in general, and in creoles in particular.
It argues that creoles are indeed diff erent from non-creoles, primarily in being less complex. While this has been argued before, this is the fi rst attempt to prove it through the use of an extensive typological database. It is noteworthy that the diff ering complexity is not related to the relative lack of morphology in creoles, since they are also simpler than analytical languages. Finally, the parallels between pidgins and creoles and in particular the fact that languages sociologically intermediate between the two categories are also structurally intermediate support the increasingly questioned belief that pidgins are born out of pidgins.
Creoles have featured prominently in these debates, with various authors arguing that they are particularly simple when set against noncreoles, with an apparent lack of overt morphology in creoles often cited as one of the ways in which their grammars are especially simplified. This paper makes two contributions to this discussion. First, it develops metrics of grammatical complexity that derive directly from a well-known model of creole development, thus providing an explicit link between the sociohistorical circumstances in which creoles formed and grammatical outcomes.
Second, it applies these metrics to the newly published dataset from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, setting this data against that from the well-knownWorld Atlas of Language Structures, allowing for a more comprehensive and rigorous quantitative comparison of complexity in contact and non-contact languages than has been previously been possible.
