Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins: What's the Metric?

This review article is a response to the way the editors of and contributors to Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins respond to McWhorter's (2001) claim that creoles have the world's simplest grammars. Although I agree with the contributors that creoles are not as simple as they may look to some, I express several concerns about the ways they (fail to) raise and/or address some fundamental issues regarding the subject matter. These include discussing what the notions simplicity and complexity really mean as they are applied to languages and whether linguistics has yet developed the necessary metric(s) for assessing complexity without biasing the issues in favor of or against particular types of languages. My arguments are intended to prompt linguists to think harder over how we can contribute to the scholarship on complexity as related to emergence, thinking of languages as emergent multi-modular phenomena, internally and externally interactive, always in the state of flux, and in search of (transient) equilibrium.