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PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/105702 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-10-01 and may be subject to change. Commentary Creoles and the notion of simplicity in human languages by Claude Hagège 1. Introduction In the following comments, I will examine the notion of complexity (Section 2), the metric proposed by McWhorter to measure it (Section 3), the limitations of the comparison between creoles and older languages (Section 4), and the ex- tent to which creoles may be said to be simple (Section 5). In conclusion, I will suggest a criterion for characterizing creoles as distinct from older languages (Section 6). 2. The notion of complexity 2.1. Complexity and Universal Grammar According to McWhorter, a complex language is one which, if compared to a simpler one, contains more “overt signalling of [:::] distinctions beyond com- municative necessity” (Abstract). McWhorter’s purpose is not to examine how languages other than creoles differ among themselves with regard to these dis- tinctions – although this would also be an interesting study. He simply says that creoles are on the lowest level of the complexity scale. Consequently, since, in McWhorter’s view, they are “unobscured by the results of millennia of [:::] drift which make Universal Grammar such a challenge to glean in older languages” (Section 5), creoles are the most direct illustrations of Universal Grammar (UG). If this notion involves universals of the Greenbergian kind, then it would mean that creoles contain more universal features than older languages. But McWhorter’s reference to works such as Seuren & Wekker (1986) indicates that what is referred to here is Universal Grammar defined in Chomsky (1981a, 1981b) as a system of principles some of which are rigidly fixed and hence Linguistic Typology 5 (2001), 167–387 1430–0532/2001/005-0167 c Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | Radboud University Nijmegen Authenticated | 131.174.248.224 Download Date | 1/28/13 11:16 AM 168 Commentary on McWhorter: Claude Hagège invariant while others are not fully fixed: they specify dimensions along which individual languages may differ. These dimensions, which represent a belated recognition of the importance of typology in the history of the Chomskyan paradigm (it was initially rejected: cf. Hagège 1981: 65, Note 26), are called parameters. Since the parameters define the range of crosslinguistic variation, language acquisition will consist of setting the parameters for UG. What is McWhorter’s position on this issue? 2.2. Complexity and parameter setting Given that UG is definitionally associated with unmarked parameter settings, it is not easy to see what exactly McWhorter means when he denies any similarity between the latter and his own hypothesis (Section 5.2) while at the same time maintaining that creoles most clearly reflect UG. Furthermore, McWhorter says (Section 1) that his “program dovetails with Bickerton’s Language Bio- program Hypothesis” – a framework which, as early as in 1981, considered creoles as manifestations of a core structure for human language. Thus, for McWhorter as well as for Bickerton, language complexity depends on the de- gree of distance from this core structure. But since McWhorter does not adopt the method of parameter settings even though the latter is implied by UG, we are confronted with the risk of running into circularity: on the one hand, UG is defined in terms of traits found in creoles, and on the other hand, creoles are declared to be closer to UG than other languages. However, there is a way out: despite the closeness of his and Bickerton’s positions, McWhorter proposes that his framework contains a novel feature inasmuch as it is more typological (Sections 1 and 5.3). In order to measure the degrees of relative typological complexity of lan- guages, one needs a metric. Let us examine McWhorter’s metric. 3. The metric of complexity 3.1. Number of marked phonemes From among the four diagnostics of grammatical complexity that are proposed (Section 2.4.3), the least controversial seems to be the number of marked phonemes, defined as those encountered less frequently in the world’s lan- guages. I agree that a phonemic inventory is more complex if it has more marked members. 3.2. The notion of rule However, I do have doubts about the syntactic diagnostic: “a syntax is more complex than another to the extent that it requires the processing of more rules”. I fail to see what the empirical reality of a rule might be. Despite Brought to you by | Radboud University Nijmegen Authenticated | 131.174.248.224 Download Date | 1/28/13 11:16 AM Creoles and the notion of simplicity in human languages 169 the deep-rooted use of the notion of rule in linguistics dominant since 1965, the status of rules as experimentally demonstrable facts has not yet been sub- stantiated (cf. Hagège 1981: 78–81). 3.3. Verbal constructions As far as the overall complexity of a grammar is concerned, one may wonder what McWhorter means by “fine-grained semantic and/or pragmatic distinc- tions”. Let us examine the examples he provides as illustrations of the syntax of verbs. He says that Koasati yókpa ‘to love’, which requires an instrumental prefix st-, has a “semantically opaque instrumental government” and is there- fore “akin to Germanic and Romance which also have rather arbitrary cases of verb government” such as dative-marked ich glaube ihm in German and accusative-marked je l’écoute in French. The reader has no choice but to con- clude that these structures, strange though it may appear, seem “opaque” or “arbitrary” to McWhorter only because they differ from their English equiva- lents I believe him and I’m listening to him! McWhorter does not mention that, with this kind of reasoning, to in listen to might seem “arbitrary” to a native speaker of French! A native speaker of English would also find “arbitrariness” in Japanese verbs requiring a relator with their nominal complement: the post- position ni, e.g., Tadao-ni au ‘to meet Tadao’, Tadao-ni tsuku ‘totouchTadao’ or ‘follow Tadao closely’ or ‘refer to Tadao’. I cite these as a small sample of the many counterexamples to the claim that Japanese “does not require storing a subset of verbs with SEMANTICALLY ARBITRARY case government spec- ifications”. But even if this were true of Japanese, calling case government phenomena of languages other than English “semantically arbitrary” amounts to claiming that the most natural criterion of non-opacity and non-arbitrariness for government is the one suggested by the facts of English! 3.4. Inflectional morphology Thus, McWhorter’s third diagnostic of grammatical complexity – verbal con- structions – is not supported by fully convincing arguments. What about the fourth one: inflectional morphology? Examining morphophonemics and sup- pletions as well as what he calls “declensional and arbitrary allomorphy”, McWhorter says that the various inflectional strategies of languages like Latin or Russian “must be learned and stored with the root”. This applies to native speakers, I presume, since the case of foreign learners is irrelevant here. The learning process by native speakers is by no means difficult: McWhorter says that his “metric takes as a given that all languages are acquired with ease by na- tive learners” (Section 2.4.2). But if so, then in exactly what respect can we say that the examples of inflectional morphology studied in this passage are more complex than the facts found in languages without inflectional morphology? Brought to you by | Radboud University Nijmegen Authenticated | 131.174.248.224 Download Date | 1/28/13 11:16 AM 170 Commentary on McWhorter: Claude Hagège 4. Limitations of the comparison between creoles and older languages 4.1. Saramaccan on one side, Tsez, Lahu, Maori on the other: simple vs. complex? In Section 3, McWhorter compares Saramaccan with Tsez in order to show that even a three-centuries-old creole like the former is less complex than an older language such as Northeast Caucasian Tsez. In Sections 4.1 and 4.2, he com- pares Saramaccan with Lahu, this time to show that of two analytic languages, the older one is the more complex. Next (Section 4.3), he compares Saramac- can with Maori with the aim of demonstrating that even a language which lacks inflection but which, unlike Lahu, lacks tone as well is more complex than a creole. Overall, the basic intent underlying such comparisons would meet with the approval of most linguists interested in typology, including myself. How- ever, when we examine the details, the picture changes: What can we learn about creoles when they are compared with other languages in terms of traits that are limited to certain parts of the world where their occurrence may be due no less to areal diffusion than to genetic kinship? I will give a single example: resultative compounds. 4.2. Resultative compounds Citing Matisoff (1973: 207-208), McWhorter mentions verbal concatenations such as those found in Lahu, e.g., tú ‘to kindle’ + tòP ‘to catch fire’ > tú tòP ‘to catch fire’ (Section 4.1). He notes that in addition to its use in front of verb compounds or monosyllabic verbs, the negator mâ can also appear BETWEEN the two elements of the compound, yielding, in this particular example, tú mâ tòP ‘does not catch fire’. In actuality, this structure is not specific to some verbs only: in addition to the case illustrated here where the second verb (tòP) appears after the verb tú, there are many other binomial verbal constructions in Lahu.
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