By Carol Myers-Scotton
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 356. paper $45.00. ISBN 0198299532.
Reviewed by Alison
Nicolle (BTL, East Africa) and Steve Nicolle (BTL, East Africa)
A creole can have several natural languages contributing to its Matrix language system, and the Embedded language is the superstratal lexifier.
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Defining Creole
By John H. McWhorter
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 444. paper $49.95. ISBN
0195166698.
Reviewed by Gerry Beimers
SIL International and University of New England (Australia)
ch 1 “official” statement of his Creole Prototype hypothesis. Here he explicates the three traits of the creole prototype, namely,
- “few or no inflectional affixes” (p. 12),
- “little or no use of tone to distinguish monosyllabic lexical items or to encode morphosyntactic distinctions” (p. 13), and
- a lack of noncompositional derivation.
ch 2: four diagnostics of grammatical complexity, namely,
- phonemic inventory,
- more syntactic rules to be processed,
- grammaticalized expressions of fine-grained semantic and pragmatic distinctions, and
- inflectional morphology.
ch 3: the developmental relationship between pidgins and creoles. In it he argues against the notion that the path from source language to creole is merely via “syntax-internal” (p. 74) transformation. The argument takes the shape of an examination of six features (which he designates as ornamental—metaphorically speaking) not found in creoles, namely:
- ergativity,
- inalienable possessive marking,
- overt marking of inherent reflexivity,
- evidential markers,
- grammaticalized referential marking, and
- consonant mutation.
ch 5: argues that the superstratist creole genesis model (advanced mainly by Chaudenson and Mufwene) is not supported by the data.
ch 11: English is “significantly less overspecified semantically and less complexified syntactically” (p. 268) compared to its Germanic sisters. His essential thesis, that this is due to a contact-based explanation, accounts for the facts. He outlines his view of overspecification and complexification and then goes on to examine ten features, namely,
- reflexivity marking,
- external possessor constructions,
- grammatical gender marking on the article,
- derivational morphology,
- directional adverbs,
- be with past participles,
- passive marking with become,
- verb-second word order,
- disappearance of thou, and
- disappearance of the indefinite pronoun man.
