World Englishes between simplification and complexification

Kortmann, Bernd; Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt

doi:10.1075/veaw.g40.17kor

In:World Englishes – Problems, Properties and Prospects: Selected papers from the 13th IAWE conference
Edited by Thomas Hoffmann and Lucia Siebers
[Varieties of English Around the World G40] 2009
► pp. 265–286

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World Englishes between simplification and complexification

Bernd Kortmann

Benedikt Szmrecsanyi | Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Published online: 23 September 2009

https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g40.17kor

This paper offers a broad empirical morphosyntactic study contributing to three debates in linguistics, one of long standing (the so-called equi-complexity axiom), the other two rather more recent, namely McWhorter’s claim (2001 a, b, 2007) that (pidgins and) creoles have the simplest grammars, and Trudgill’s claim (2009) that high-contact varieties of English are characterized by structural simplification processes while low-contact varieties are the result of complexification processes. We will present the results of comparative analyses covering three notionally different morphosyntactic complexity metrics applied to two different data types for about 50 largely non-standard varieties of English (low-contact L1s, high-contact L1s, L2s, pidgins and creoles). Ultimately, we believe to be in a firm position to reject the axiom that the morphosyntax of all languages (and varieties of a language) is equally complex and to support both the claims by McWhorter and Trudgill.

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