Deconstructing creole: The rationale

Pidgin and Creole Languages

“…For developmental issues on PCs, the following edited collections are highly recommended: Hymes (1971), Valdman (1977), Hill (1979), Muysken and Smith (1986), Mufwene (1993), Arends et al (1995), DeGraff (1999b), Lefebvre et al (2006), Ansaldo et al (2007), Kouwenberg and Singler (2009), Lefebvre (2011), and several edited volumes of the Creole Language Library (Benjamins). To date, knowledge of the nonstandard lexifiers spoken by the European colonists remains limited, though more research is now underway and much of the scholarship on the dialectology of the European lexifiers is becoming handy.…”

Introduction

“…Pidgins appear to be less complex than their lexifier languages. Also the claim that creoles constitute a typologically distinct type of language (McWhorter 2005;Bakker et al 2011) is also challenged (Ansaldo et al 2007). This is also regarded as the key to their functionality as makeshift, but limited communication devices.…”

Pidgins

“…Bickerton 1988;Muysken 1988;andmore recently McWhorter 2001, 2005;Ansaldo and Matthews 2008 with regard to pidgins and especially creoles; and Kusters 2003;Miestamo et al 2008;Givón 2009 in general, plus papers in collections like Sampson et al (eds. It has obvious implications for concepts such as 'linguistic complexity' (e.g.…”