| 1. |
- Jansson, Fredrik, et al.
(författare)
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Modeling the Evolution of Creoles
- 2015
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Ingår i: Language Dynamics and Change. - : Brill. - 2210-5824 .- 2210-5832. ; 5:1, s. 1-51
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Various theories have been proposed regarding the origin of creole languages. Describing a process where only the end result is documented involves several methodological difficulties. In this paper we try to address some of the issues by using a novel mathematical model together with detailed empirical data on the origin and structure of Mauritian Creole. Our main focus is on whether Mauritian Creole may have originated only from a mutual desire to communicate, without a target language or prestige bias. Our conclusions are affirmative. With a confirmation bias towards learning from successful communication, the model predicts Mauritian Creole better than any of the input languages, including the lexifier French, thus providing a compelling and specific hypothetical model of how creoles emerge. The results also show that it may be possible for a creole to develop quickly after first contact, and that it was created mostly from material found in the input languages, but without inheriting their morphology.
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| 2. |
- Jansson, Fredrik, et al.
(författare)
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Modelling the evolution of creoles
- 2012
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Ingår i: The Evolution of Language. - Singapore : World Scientific Publishing Company. - 9789814401494 ; , s. 464-465, s. 464-465
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)
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| 3. |
- Parkvall, Mikael, 1971-, et al.
(författare)
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Creoles and sociolinguistic complexity : Response to Ansaldo
- 2018
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Ingår i: Language sciences (Oxford). - : Elsevier BV. - 0388-0001 .- 1873-5746. ; 66, s. 226-233
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In an earlier article in this journal, Umberto Ansaldo states that creoles are sociolinguistically the most complex of languages, equalled only by the situation in South India. In our article we show that this claim is not supported by facts about global multilingualism, creole societies, creole language structures and theories of language contact. The vast majority of the worlds population is multilingual: the average human speaks almost two languages. Nothing in the sociolinguistic situation of current creole societies is exceptional vis-a-vis situations of other minority languages. Yet, creoles differ structurally from the other languages of the world. That finding is supported by all empirical studies that include data on creoles and non-creoles, despite exceptionalists being accused of being inspired by ideology. The feature pool theory (cf. Mufwene 2001), analyzing creoles as simply language hybrids like a great many other languages, does not predict the relative analyticity of creole languages, since several equally analytic creoles and pidgins have come about from contact between morphologically rich languages. Crucially, adherents of this theory, including Ansaldo, have not responded to criticisms along these lines. Sudden language contact, as in situations of pidginization and creole genesis, leads to loss of irregularities and morphological paradigms. We argue that Ansaldo's claims are based on an insufficient familiarity with the relevant literature, as well as frequent misquotations.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Parkvall, Mikael, 1971-, et al.
(författare)
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Returning a maverick creole to the fold : the Berbice Dutch enigma revisited
- 2023
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Ingår i: Folia linguistica. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 0165-4004 .- 1614-7308. ; 57:1, s. 177-203
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Berbice Dutch was a creole language spoken in the Republic of Guyana in South America, a country first under Dutch, and later under British colonial rule. Owing mainly to Silvia Kouwenberg (A grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole, De Gruyter Mouton, 1994), we were blessed with a detailed synchronic documentation of Berbice Dutch before its demise. However, the formation of the language remains clouded in mystery: its grammar and (basic) lexicon display a seemingly unique mixture of Dutch (Creole) and Eastern Ijo, as a result of which the language is often portrayed as a challenge to existing contact-linguistic theory. In this paper, a scenario is proposed that, rather than challenging the said theory, is fully grounded in it: it will be argued that the language was a case of serial glottogenesis: a first stage of creolisation was later followed by language mixing. The paper furthermore presents hitherto unknown historical data pertaining to the arrival of Ijo speakers in Berbice.
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| 7. |
- Bakker, Peter, et al.
(författare)
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Creoles are typologically distinct from non-creoles
- 2011
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Ingår i: Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages ( Print). - : John Benjamins Publishing Company. - 0920-9034 .- 1569-9870. ; 26:1, s. 5-42
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In creolist circles, there has been a long-standing debate whether creoles differ structurally from non-creole languages and thus would form a special class of languages with specific typological properties. This debate about the typological status of creole languages has severely suffered from a lack of systematic empirical study. This paper presents for the first time a number of large-scale empirical investigations of the status of creole languages as a typological class on the basis of different and well-balanced samples of creole and non-creole languages. Using statistical modeling (multiple regression) and recently developed computational tools of quantitative typology (phylogenetic trees and networks), this paper provides robust evidence that creoles indeed form a structurally distinguishable subgroup within the world's languages. The findings thus seriously challenge approaches that hold that creole languages are structurally indistinguishable from non-creole languages.
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| 10. |
- Bergren, Max, et al.
(författare)
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Inferring the location of authors from words in their texts
- 2015
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 20th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics. - Linköping : Linköping University Electronic Press. - 9789175190983
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- For the purposes of computational dialec- tology or other geographically bound text analysis tasks, texts must be annotated with their or their authors’ location. Many texts are locatable but most have no ex- plicit annotation of place. This paper describes a series of experiments to de- termine how positionally annotated mi- croblog posts can be used to learn loca- tion indicating words which then can be used to locate blog texts and their authors. A Gaussian distribution is used to model the locational qualities of words. We in- troduce the notion of placeness to describe how locational words are.We find that modelling word distributions to account for several locations and thus several Gaussian distributions per word, defining a filter which picks out words with high placeness based on their local distributional context, and aggregating lo- cational information in a centroid for each text gives the most useful results. The re- sults are applied to data in the Swedish language.
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