5).Ī recent contribution to the Creole Debate is the proposal offered by Aboh ( 2015), who conceives of these languages as mixed grammars. On the other hand, other scholars have rejected these analyses and prefer to depict creoles as byproducts of their shared sociocultural history, often related to black slavery and plantation societies (DeGraff, 2003 Mufwene, 1997), thus claiming that creoles do not show anything exceptional from a strictly linguistic point of view (DeGraff, 2005), and that describing them as “simpler” is just a controversial statement, which may be unconsciously derived from the racist bias that the European colonizers had about the Africans’ cognitive skills to learn European languages (Aboh and DeGraff, 2016, p. 5) even claims that creoles should be seen as “the world’s simplest grammars”, since, having developed out of pidgins just a few hundred years ago, they would not have had the time to enrich their systems with the structural complexities-often resulting from long processes of grammaticalization-which appear to characterize older languages. In particular, McWhorter ( 1998) proposes a Creole Prototype, according to which a creole would be generally characterized by (1) minimal inflectional affixation (2) minimal use of tones and (3) semantically transparent derivation. On the one hand, some scholars have claimed that creoles may be classified according to their structural properties (Bickerton, 1981) or as a typological class (Bakker et al., 2011 McWhorter, 1998, 2001 Seuren and Wekker, 1986). For the past 30 years the field of contact linguistics has been characterized by a heated debate, recently labeled the Creole Debate (McWhorter, 2018a), which focuses on the structural and typological status of creole languages.
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