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Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches
Edited by Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola
[Not in series 211] 2017
► pp. 193–217

Chapter 9
The simple emerging from the complex

Nominal number in Juba Arabic creole

| Aarhus University
This chapter examines the system of nominal number in Juba Arabic. Its complexity is compared with its superstrate language, Sudanese Arabic, and its substrate, the Nilotic language Bari. It also compares its similarity with a number of creoles, Nilotic languages and Arabic dialects. Both Arabic and Nilotic languages are notorious for their complex systems of nominal number, making Juba Arabic an interesting case for the study of creole complexity. Following Bakker et al. (2011), I use computational phylogenetic tools to look at the linguistic similarity of the languages under examination. The findings show that Juba Arabic is simpler than its constrates, and that it is more similar to unrelated creoles than the languages from which it emerged.
Article outline
  • 9.1Introduction
  • 9.2Theoretical preliminaries
    • 9.2.1The Feature Pool Hypothesis
    • 9.2.2Creole distinctiveness
    • 9.2.3Hypotheses
  • 9.3Methodological preliminaries
    • 9.3.1Phylogenetic trees and linguistics
    • 9.3.2Sample
    • 9.3.3The data
  • 9.4The pool of features
    • 9.4.1Number affixing
    • 9.4.2Number and noun stems
    • 9.4.3Collectives
    • 9.4.4Other types of number inflection of nouns
    • 9.4.5Pronominal number
    • 9.4.6Number agreement
  • 9.5Phylogenetic analysis
  • 9.6Theoretical implications and questions for further research
  • 9.7Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 31 May 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.211.09gol
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