In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Linguistic simplicity and complexity: Why do languages undress?
  • Alain Kihm
Linguistic simplicity and complexity: Why do languages undress? By John H. McWhorter. (Language contact and bilingualism 1.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Pp. x, 335. ISBN 9781934078402. $139.95 (Hb).

This is and is not a new book. It is not new since nearly all chapters are reprints of already published articles. It is new insofar as those parts that are not reprints, in particular the general introduction and Ch. 1—already published to be sure, but in 2011, so almost first-hand—are witness to serious inflections in the thought of one of today's leading creolists.

Since creolists, nay scholars generally, who admit to their not having been quite right are something of a rarity, I devote most of the present review to this evolution in McWhorter's view of what kind of languages creoles are and how they come to be. This must indeed be examined at length since it is what gives coherence to a string of essays that would otherwise look more like a miscellany than a collection.

In 1998, M published an article in Language (later reprinted in McWhorter 2005) where he proposed that creole languages could infallibly be identified by searching them for the following three features (the 'creole litmus test'): (i) 'little or no inflectional affixation', (ii) 'little or no use of tone to distinguish monosyllabic lexical items or morphosyntactic categories', and (iii) 'little or no noncompositional combinations of derivational morphemes with roots' (39). Together, the three features make up the 'creole prototype'.

This proposal met with ample discussion and sharp criticism. Part of the criticism was ill-founded as it stemmed from failure to understand the gist of M's hypothesis. It is futile, for instance, to raise the objection that many languages one cannot suspect of creoleness show one or the other of the three features. Indeed, what the creole prototype hypothesis implies is that no language that is not a creole will show all three features TOGETHER. [End Page 657]

Yet, the objection is so often raised that M takes great pains to demonstrate that languages may show features (i) and (ii), but fail the creole test on feature (iii). He illustrates with the Papuan language Abun (7-10). M could not fail to realize, however, that such a drawn out misunderstanding might be due to the fact that his original three criteria were in need of some qualifications, which he provides in Ch. 1.

The main problem with the criteria, however, lies in the 'little or no' quantification. To be sure, it reflects M's basic honesty. Being human devices, phenomenal languages are not perfect systems— whatever they may be 'essentially'. Categorical assertions may therefore be factually true for easily individuated features of particular languages—for example, Modern English has no /y/ in its phonemic inventory—but they are bound to be ridden with exceptions at any more general level. M is well aware of this. He knows that, had he bluntly written that creole languages have 'no inflectional affixation', disclaimers would instantly have rained down upon his head.

The 'little' nevertheless poses a serious problem, since it cannot but raise the question of how little should little be not to become (too) much, and doesn't M's theory run the risk of unfalsifiability if no precise upper bound can be fixed—as none can be in all scientific honesty? The only thing we can reasonably be sure of is that the amount must be small: no known creole language has five or more inflectional affixes in its verbal system, for instance. Hence, M's 'little'.

What this argument actually points to, I think, is that the creole prototype more readily tells us which languages certainly are NOT creoles rather than which ones certainly are. In other words, it tells us that Classical Arabic or Mazatec cannot be creolized languages, while leaving us in doubt—if sticking to purely formal criteria—with Abun or Guinea-Bissau Kriyol.

This perceived difficulty, inherent to all typological endeavors given the untidiness of linguistic evidence, is probably what led M to significantly change his tack. From the start, the...

pdf

Share