John Mcwhorter
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 457550 |
|---|---|
| NOME | John Mcwhorter |
| PRENOMES | John |
| SOBRENOME | Mcwhorter |
| ASSINATURA | MCWHORTER J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2979-2075 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 14 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1992 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Spoken and Sign Language Emergence
A comparison of emerging signed languages and creole languages provides evidence that, when language is emerging, it prioritizes marking the novelty of information; is readily recursive; favors the manner of action (aspect) over the time of action (tense); develops inflection readily only in a visual, as opposed to aural, mode; and develops derivational opacity only as the result of drift over long periods of time
Heritage Language, Creole Language
Revisiting Invariant am in Early African American Vernacular English
Scholars of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have generally assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of Black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier Black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in renditions of interviews with ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the interviewers. …
What multiethnolects reveal about creole genesis
Recent theories of creole genesis propose that creole languages did not emerge via the expansion of pidgin varieties (DeGraff, 2001; Mufwene, 2001, 2008). This paper argues that the multiethnolects that have formed in many European cities constitute a demonstration case of the genesis scenario these new creolist theories reconstruct. Crucially, however, the multiethnolects, while displaying a modest degree of grammatical simplification and restru…
Contact languages
Creole studies
Reviewed by: Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches ed. by Peter Bakker et al. John McWhorter Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches. Ed. by Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen, and Eeva Sippola. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. Pp. 414. ISBN 978902721249. $143 (Hb). Creole studies has a well-deserved reputation, well known even to linguists with no special interest in the area, of being highly contentious. Many are aware that the m…
The Iberian Challenge
Creole languages lexified by Spanish and Portuguese have played a relatively small role in theories of creole genesis. This volume argues that there is not a priori reason to give English and French-based plantation creoles a preferential treatment, but shows that Iberian-based creoles demonstrate a diversity of complex circumstances that any overarching theory of creole genesis ought to take into account.
Iberian Challenge
The Missing Spanish Creoles Are Still Missing
Too Good to be True
The grammatical items are not Norse, speakers never called it Norse, and Germanic speakers almost always learned their conquerees’ language rather than imposing it—Old English is not Norse
A response to Mufwene
Preview this article: A response to Mufwene, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.29.1.07who-1.gif
Language Turned Off
Preview this article: Language Turned Off?: The legacy of the bioprogram hypothesis, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.28.1.05mcw-1.gif
It’s not over
Preview this article: It’s not over: Why it matters whether there is a such thing as a creole, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.28.2.05mcw-1.gif
Why noncompositional derivation isn’t boring
Preview this article: Why noncompositional derivation isn’t boring: A second try on the ‘other’ part of the Creole prototype hypothesis, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.28.1.08mcw-1.gif
Case closed
Preview this article: Case closed?: Testing the feature pool hypothesis, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.27.1.07mcw-1.gif
The Nature of Argument
Preview this article: The Nature of Argument: Is the Creole Exceptionalism Hypothesis Dead?, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.27.2.07mcw-1.gif
Tying up loose ends
Since the introduction of the Creole Prototype hypothesis in 1998, much of the controversy it has occasioned has centered on a question as to whether it is scientifically appropriate to reconstruct creoles as born as pidgins, rather than as results of only moderately transformational second-language acquisition or as simply mixtures of ‘features’ from assorted languages coming together. This paper first outlines traits in creoles that reveal thei…
Hither and thither in Saramaccan Creole
Manhattan Institute
Reply to Lefebvre
Deconstructing Creole
Preview this article: Deconstructing Creole, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.23.2.17mcw-1.gif
Language Interrupted
Foreigners often say that the English language is "easy". A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straightforward. But linguists generally deny claims that certain languages are 'easier' than others, since it is assumed that all languages are complex to the same degree. For example, they will point to English's use of the word "do" - Do you know French? This usage is coun…
What the creolist learns from Cantonese and Kabardian
Preview this article: What the creolist learns from Cantonese and Kabardian, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/dia.23.1.08mcw-1.gif
Saramaccan and Haitian as young grammars
Preview this article: Saramaccan and Haitian as young grammars: The pitfalls of syntactocentrism in Creole genesis research, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.19.1.04mcw-1.gif
Book notice
What happened to English
It has become widely accepted that English has undergone no interruption in transmission, its paucity of inflection treated as a random loss paralleled in Scandinavian. This paper argues that English has in fact lost more of the Proto-Germanic inheritance than any other Germanic language including Afrikaans. These losses extend far beyond inflection: where other Germanic languages overtly mark a given feature, in a great weight of cases English l…
Language Interrupted
Foreigners often say that the English language is "easy". A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straightforward. But linguists generally deny claims that certain languages are 'easier' than others, since it is assumed that all languages are complex to the same degree. For example, they will point to English's use of the word "do" - Do you know French? This usage is coun…
Looking into the Void
Dans cet article, l'A. examine le comportement de la construction copule + NP dans les creoles des Caraibes bases sur l'anglais, et recherche plus particulierement l'origine de la copule zero dans le mesolecte. Il montre qu'une nouvelle perspective diachronique liee a ce fragment revele de multiples apercus en ce qui concerne les relations du continuum allant du basilecte au mesolecte avec les mecanismes d'acquisition et de reduction du langage ;…
Spoken and Sign Language Emergence
A comparison of emerging signed languages and creole languages provides evidence that, when language is emerging, it prioritizes marking the novelty of information; is readily recursive; favors the manner of action (aspect) over the time of action (tense); develops inflection readily only in a visual, as opposed to aural, mode; and develops derivational opacity only as the result of drift over long periods of time
Revisiting Invariant am in Early African American Vernacular English
Scholars of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have generally assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of Black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier Black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in renditions of interviews with ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the interviewers. …
NI and the Copula System in Swahili
The copula in present-day Swahili is primarily expressed with the non-variant item ni in all persons. Historical documents show that the copula situation was markedly different as recently as two centuries ago. There was a full verb -li "to be" which was used only with locative sentences, while in equa-tional sentences there was no expressed copula. M existed only as a focus particle of free syntactic movement, and also as a diachronically relate…
Substratal Influence in Saramaccan Serial Verb Constructions
Bickerton's bioprogram hypothesis uses serial verbs as a primary demonstration that Saramaccan represents the closest approximation to Universal Grammar extant, judging from the fact that speakers of mutually unintelligible West African languages formulated it with little contact with European languages. Closer examination of Saramaccan and its substrate languages suggests, however, that the creole is a prime demonstration of substrate influence.…
NI and the Copula System in Swahili
The copula in present-day Swahili is primarily expressed with the non-variant item ni in all persons. Historical documents show that the copula situation was markedly different as recently as two centuries ago. There was a full verb -li "to be" which was used only with locative sentences, while in equa-tional sentences there was no expressed copula. M existed only as a focus particle of free syntactic movement, and also as a diachronically relate…
From Focus Marker to Copula in Swahili
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Historical Issues in African Linguistics (1994)
Rejoinder to Derek Bickerton
Preview this article: Rejoinder to Derek Bickerton, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.9.1.07mcw-1.gif
Creole Studies and Historical Linguistics
Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995)
Sisters Under the Skin
This paper shows that the Atlantic English-based Creoles share six features which are derivable neither from superstratal, substratal, nor universal influences, and therefore constitute idiosyncratic correspondences. The six features indicate that these Creoles all derive from a single ancestor of expanded structure, in contrast to the dominant polygenetic scenario under which the Atlantic English-based Creoles emerged, in essence, independently …
Looking into the Void
Dans cet article, l'A. examine le comportement de la construction copule + NP dans les creoles des Caraibes bases sur l'anglais, et recherche plus particulierement l'origine de la copule zero dans le mesolecte. Il montre qu'une nouvelle perspective diachronique liee a ce fragment revele de multiples apercus en ce qui concerne les relations du continuum allant du basilecte au mesolecte avec les mecanismes d'acquisition et de reduction du langage ;…
The Diachrony of Predicate Negation in Saramaccan Creole
Unlike most Caribbean English-based creoles, Saramaccan has two predicate negator allomorphs, á and ná. While aspects of their distribution suggest that the former is simply a phonologically eroded reflex of the latter, synchronic, diachronic, and comparative evidence indicate that á actually resulted from a phonological coalescence of a resumptive pronominal and the following original negator, in the context of topic-comment constructions. This …
John H. McWhorter
Preview this article: John H. McWhorter, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.11.1.24joh-1.gif
It Happened at Cormantin
Comparative and sociohistorical facts suggest that Sranan arose among castle slaves on the Gold Coast in the 1630s. Jamaican Maroon Spirit Language is an offshoot of early Sranan, which allows the deduction that créole English had developed in Suriname by 1671. However, during the English hegemony there, 1651-1667, Suriname harbored only small plantations, where Whites worked closely with equal numbers of Blacks. Such conditions were unlikely to …
The Heart of the Issue
John McWhorter in response to Derek Bickerton
From Contact to Creole and beyond
Changing Meanings, Changing Functions
Book notice
What happened to English
It has become widely accepted that English has undergone no interruption in transmission, its paucity of inflection treated as a random loss paralleled in Scandinavian. This paper argues that English has in fact lost more of the Proto-Germanic inheritance than any other Germanic language including Afrikaans. These losses extend far beyond inflection: where other Germanic languages overtly mark a given feature, in a great weight of cases English l…
The rest of the story
Preview this article: The rest of the story: Restoring pidginization to creole genesis theory, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.17.1.02mcw-1.gif
Saramaccan and Haitian as young grammars
Preview this article: Saramaccan and Haitian as young grammars: The pitfalls of syntactocentrism in Creole genesis research, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.19.1.04mcw-1.gif
What the creolist learns from Cantonese and Kabardian
Preview this article: What the creolist learns from Cantonese and Kabardian, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/dia.23.1.08mcw-1.gif
Language Interrupted
Foreigners often say that the English language is "easy". A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straightforward. But linguists generally deny claims that certain languages are 'easier' than others, since it is assumed that all languages are complex to the same degree. For example, they will point to English's use of the word "do" - Do you know French? This usage is coun…
Hither and thither in Saramaccan Creole
Manhattan Institute
Reply to Lefebvre
Deconstructing Creole
Preview this article: Deconstructing Creole, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.23.2.17mcw-1.gif
Tying up loose ends
Since the introduction of the Creole Prototype hypothesis in 1998, much of the controversy it has occasioned has centered on a question as to whether it is scientifically appropriate to reconstruct creoles as born as pidgins, rather than as results of only moderately transformational second-language acquisition or as simply mixtures of ‘features’ from assorted languages coming together. This paper first outlines traits in creoles that reveal thei…
Case closed
Preview this article: Case closed?: Testing the feature pool hypothesis, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.27.1.07mcw-1.gif
Philosophy (29 obras) · Linguistics (27 obras) · History (23 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (21 obras) · Creole language (16 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras) · Computer Science (14 obras) · History (10 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (10 obras) · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies (8 obras)