This paper demonstrates that the notion of simplicity as often used in creole studies is completely irrelevant to the understanding of the structure, as well as the genesis, of creole languages. This is because creole languages are linguistic hybrids in the biological sense. They emerge from the recombination of linguistic features from different languages. Given this perspective, it appears that what could be of some relevance to the study of language change is rather the notion of complexity. Within the framework of Competition and Selection as proposed in Mufwene (2001ff.), and adopted in this paper, creole languages develop opaque syntactic and semantic features. These could not have arisen solely in the context of their source languages. Accordingly, the common claim that creoles are simplified versions of their sources is a fallacy, just as it would be to claim in biology that hybrids are genetically simplified children of their parents.
2018. Areal diffusion and the limits of grammaticalization. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 337 ff.
Ansaldo, Umberto, Walter Bisang & Pui Yiu Szeto
2018. Grammaticalization in isolating languages and the notion of complexity. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 219 ff.
Arkadiev, Peter & Timur Maisak
2018. Grammaticalization in the North Caucasian languages. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 116 ff.
Axelsen, Jacob Bock & Susanna Manrubia
2014. River density and landscape roughness are universal determinants of linguistic diversity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281:1784 ► pp. 20133029 ff.
2018. Grammaticalization processes in the languages of South Asia. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 189 ff.
Dahl, Östen
2018. Grammaticalization in the languages of Europe. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 79 ff.
Esseesy, Mohssen
2018. Typological features of grammaticalization in Semitic. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 35 ff.
Fox, Susan, Anthony Grant & Laura Wright
2023. Contact Theory and the History of English. In Medieval English in a Multilingual Context [New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 17 ff.
2018. Grammaticalization and inflectionalization in Iranian. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 57 ff.
Haspelmath, Martin
2018. Revisiting the anasynthetic spiral. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 97 ff.
Heine, Bernd
2018. Grammaticalization in Africa. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 16 ff.
Herbert, Marjorie & Acrisio Pires
2020. Bilingualism and Code-Blending Among Deaf ASL-English Bilinguals. In New Trends in Language Acquisition Within the Generative Perspective [Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, 49], ► pp. 99 ff.
Johanson, Lars & Éva Á. Csató
2018. Grammaticalization in Turkic. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 146 ff.
Klamer, Marian
2018. Typology and grammaticalization in the Papuan languages of Timor, Alor, and Pantar. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 235 ff.
2020. Language Contact and Change through Child First Language Acquisition. In The Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 67 ff.
O’Shannessy, Carmel
2021. How ordinary child language acquisition processes can lead to the unusual outcome of a mixed language. International Journal of Bilingualism 25:2 ► pp. 458 ff.
Smith, Hiram L.
2018. Addressing questions of grammaticalization in creoles. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 372 ff.
Zariquiey, Roberto
2018. Diachronic stories of body-part nouns in some language families of South America. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. 350 ff.
2018. Preface. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. viii ff.
[no author supplied]
2018. Series preface. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. vii ff.
[no author supplied]
2018. List of abbreviations. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. ix ff.
[no author supplied]
2018. Copyright Page. In Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective, ► pp. iv ff.
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