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This paper is about one aspect of expanded pidgins and creoles that makes them less complex than the languages that contributed to their development - that is, the use of analytic grammatical markers rather than synthetic ones. Accounting for the origins of this 'analyticity' leads into a discussion of the meaning of simplification and the different forms it takes. The major part of the paper examines the hypothesis that creole analyticity is the result of simplification that occurs in adult second language acquisition. But first, as requested by the workshop organisers, I present some background about my views concerning the notion of complexity and my particular interest in it. |
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