Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins: What’s the Metric?

Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins: What’s the Metric?

This review article is a response to the way the editors of and contributors to Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins respond to McWhorter’s (2001) claim that creoles have the world’s simplest grammars. Although I agree with the contributors that creoles are not as simple as they may look to some, I express several concerns about the ways they (fail to) raise and/or address some fund...

Paradigmatic complexity in pidgins and creoles

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 noncreoles...

Morphology in Pidgins and Creoles

The Evolution of Language: Hints from Creoles and Pidgins

The subtitle of this essay should not be interpreted in the way suggested by Bickerton (1990, 1995, 2002) or Givón (1998). Creoles can inform our research on the evolution of language not because there is anything empirically exceptional or unusual about the way they emerged (see, e.g., DeGraff 2003, 2005) but because the multitude of facts that we have learned over the past couple of decades a...

the effect of task complexity on efl learners’ written task performance in terms of accuracy and complexity

هدف اصلی این تحقیق بررسی تاثیر افزایش میزان پیچیدگی تکالیف مکالمه محور بر دقت و صحت و پیچیدگی عملکرد نوشتاری زبان آموزان می باشد. بدین منظور، 50 نفر از دانش آموزان دختر در رده ی سنی 15 الی 18 سال درسطح pre-intermediate از طریق petو vhs تست به عنوان شرکت کنندگان در تحقیق انتخاب شدند و به دو گروه آزمایشی و کنترل بصورت اتفاقی تقسیم شدند. اعضای گروه آزمایشی دو تکلیف ساده و پیچیده را طی 2 جلسه انجام...