Paradigmatic complexity in pidgins and creoles

Abstract

The last decade has seen increasing attention paid to questions of grammatical complexity, in particular regarding the extent to which some languages can be said to be more ‘complex’ than others, whether globally or with respect to particular subsystems. Creoles have featured prominently in these debates, with various authors arguing that they are particularly simple when set against non-creoles, 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-known World Atlas of Language Structures, allowing for a more comprehensive and rigorous quantitative comparison of complexity in contact and non-contact languages than has previously been possible. It will be seen that there is good evidence that contact languages are simplified overall with respect to a class of complexities labelled paradigmatic here but that this general conclusion nevertheless masks significant underlying variation among them.

Is regularisation uniform across linguistic levels? Comparing learning and production of unconditioned probabilistic variation in morphology and word order.

“…We will return to this in section 6.1.1. Overall, our findings do not support global level-specific regularisation biases as an explanation for the apparent asymmetry between simplification of morphological and word order variation hinted at in the literature on language learning and pidgin formation (Bichakjian 1988;Drechsel 1981;Good 2015). Instead, this study suggests that variation is reduced to a similar degree across linguistic levels, with any asymmetry likely due to differing complexity of linguistic paradigms or other features of the contact (or second) languages (Ansaldo et al 2007;Mufwene 2008).…”

“…These studies implicitly assume uniform mechanisms and processes behind regularisation; no study has directly compared how learners respond to variation at different levels. However, research on natural language learning and formation suggests that morphological and syntactic variation may not be treated in the same way by learners (Good 2015;Siegel 2006;Slobin 1986).…”

“…For example, possessor inflection found in West Greenlandinc (and often in other source languages, e.g., English) is omitted, leaving the possessor and the thing possessed in bare juxtaposition (van der Voort 1997(van der Voort , 2013. To summarise, it has been claimed that morphological complexity is generally reduced in pidgins relative to their source languages, while syntactic complexity is more stable (Bakker 2008;Good 2015). Under the assumption that simplification processes in language formation-as well as in language change more generally (Bichakjian 1988;Slobin 1986)-reflect individual biases during learning (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan 2006;Siegel 2006) and/or use (McWhorter 2001Parkvall 2008), the early loss of inflectional morphology and maintenance of word order variation in pidginisation suggest the possibility of a level-specific regularisation bias.…”

“…However, studies on natural language learning and pidginisation suggest that morphological and syntactic variation may be treated differently. In particular, there is evidence that morphological variation may be more susceptible to regularisation (Good 2015;Siegel 2006;Slobin 1986). In this paper we provide the first systematic comparison of the strength of regularisation across these two linguistic levels.…”

Not all grammatical features are robustly transmitted during the emergence of creoles

“…In this paper, I take issue with both sides of the debate. I claim that, on the one hand, grammars are not robustly transmitted during the emergence of creole languages, since certain core aspects of language (e.g., bound morphology and tones) tend to be reduced during creolization (Siegel, 2003(Siegel, , 2006Good, 2012Good, , 2015Parkvall, 2008;Jansson et al, 2015;Saldana et al, 2018); at the same time, I also argue that creoles are not the simplest languages in the world, since in other aspects of their grammars (e.g., syntax, phonology and semantics), they may inherit a fair number of overt distinctions, which make them quite complex, from an overall comparative perspective.…”