Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity: Why Do Languages Undress? (Language Contact and Bilingualism (Lcb))by John H. McWhorter
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. No reviews no reviews | add a review
In John McWhorter's Defining Creole anthology of 2005, his collected articles conveyed the following theme: His hypothesis that creole languages are definable not just in the sociohistorical sense, but in the grammatical sense. His publications since the 1990's have argued that all languages of the world that lack a certain three traits together are creoles (i.e. born as pidgins a few hundred years ago and fleshed out into real languages). He also argued that in light of their pidgin birth, such languages are less grammatically complex than others, as the result of their recent birth as pidgins. These two claims have been highly controversial among creolists as well as other linguists. In this volume, Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity, McWhorter gathers articles he has written since then, in the wake of responses from a wide range of creolists and linguists. These articles represent a considerable divergence in direction from his earlier work. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)417.22Language Linguistics Dialectology and historical linguistics Dialectology Pidgins, creoles, mixed languagesLC ClassificationRatingAverage: No ratings.Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |