Complexity revisited: Pichi (Equatorial Guinea) and Spanish in contact

Abstract

Recent attempts to prove the simplicity of Creoles with respect to non-Creoles have, like preceding ones concentrated on describing the assumed paucity of selected surface phenomena in quantitative terms. None of these accounts has taken into consideration that typically, Creoles are languages in contact. In the multilingual speech communities of West Africa but equally so in other regions, Creoles and Pidgins are in contact with lexifier superstrates, with historically unrelated non-lexifier superstrates and with a host of other, oftentimes substrate, languages. This paper attempts to provide answers to two questions. (1) Can we reconcile the complexity of the mixed grammar and lexicon of a language like Pichi with the notion of simplicity given that code-mixing of the type presented here forms an integral part of the linguistic system of the language? (2) Can we reconcile the restructuring (or “elaboration” in terms of the simplicity hypothesis) of Pichi grammar and lexicon through code-mixing within the short time-span of a hundred and seventy years with the notion that the youth of Creoles makes them simpler than non-Creoles.