Creoles, Typology and Phylogenetics: Reconstructing Creole

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One of the peculiarities of the field of creole studies is that a majority of creolists are actually uncomfortable with the idea that the languages they study should constitute a separate class of languages and to date, no consensus on the matter has been reached.The main goal of this book is to investigate whether creoles represent a typologically coherent group of languages on the basis of a large body of empirical evidence using tools borrowed from evolutionary biology. Various structural aspects of creoles are probed in the context of the world's linguistic diversity and the results clearly show that creoles represent a typologically distinguishable subset of the world's natural languages. Several grammatical features found predominantly in creoles are identified as being characteristic of creoles. Creole languages share a common history of interrupted transmission and the presence of these features in creoles is argued to be reflected in their synchronic structural make-up. Evidence for this is gathered from grammaticalization studies, as most of these features represent early stages along grammaticalization paths commonly observed in the world's languages.