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Article published In:
Language Ecology
Vol. 3:1 (2019) ► pp.89–119

Creole typology is analytic typology

| University of Hong Kong
| University of Chicago
| University of Hong Kong | University of Sydney

This paper reviews a number of specific features typical of analytic languages, in an attempt to investigate whether Creole languages can indeed be grouped, at least structurally, with other languages of the analytic (or isolating) type. Based on Sybesma et al. (forthcoming), a study of the nature of analyticity, we select eight features which constitute rather obvious structural parallels between two unrelated groups, namely Sinitic and Kwa. In terms of Creole languages, these eight features can be also clearly located within the APiCS (Michaelis et al. 2013). Contrary to works like Bakker et al. (2011) which argue for the existence of a “Creole Prototype”, our results show that Creole languages do not cluster with each other against other non-Creole languages. Instead, various Creoles clearly owe their grammatical profile to the languages that dominate the typological environment in which they are formed.

Keywords: analytic language, Creole, linguistic complexity, phylogenetic network, Kwa, Sinitic
Article outline
  • 1.On linguistic complexity
  • 2.Kwa and Sinitic
    • 2.1Tone
    • 2.2Bare Nouns
    • 2.3Determiners and classifiers
    • 2.4Inherent objects
    • 2.5Verb-object compounds
    • 2.6Tense
    • 2.7Serialization
    • 2.8Reduplication
    • 2.9Nominal case marking
  • 3.Creole features
  • 4.Additional features that Creoles and analytic languages share
    • 4.1‘Say’-complementizer
    • 4.2Utterance particles
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/le.17003.sze
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