The uniformitarian approach to language evolution advocated by Mufwene, DeGraff, and Aboh claims that the emergence of creoles is driven by the same restructuring processes as those of other languages. Together with the genetic inheritance from the parent languages, language contact and population structure are important factors which may explain why some emergent varieties exhibit more divergent structures than others. The analysis of Brazilian Portuguese presented here has been conceived of within this uniformitarian view on language evolution. Despite the striking divergence between the Brazilian and the European Portuguese varieties, Brazilian Portuguese cannot be considered a creole language because it was not forged in a society characterized by the same demographic distribution pattern of the ecologies in which creole languages have emerged. It is, nevertheless, a language that has emerged in an ecology of intense multilingualism in which European, Bantu, Gbe, and Native Brazilian languages interacted daily. Explanations for its peculiarities will then have to take this fact into consideration. From a uniformitarian approach, the study of a non-creole language resulting from intense multilingual contact such as Brazilian Portuguese can help shed light on its main claim: that creoles and noncreoles have emerged by the same restructuring mechanisms.

Framed within historical pragmatics, this chapter revisits and explains the nature of Portuguese encounters along the western coast of Africa as reported by sailors, missionaries, and merchants. The chapter examines sources written in Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French, or, later, English. Although Portuguese was used as the trade lingua franca in forts such as Elmina, there is no evidence that it ever pidginized. This disputes the long-held assumption in creolistics that the initial contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans systematically produced pidgins. An important reason is that the use of Portuguese was restricted to the brokers, also known in colonial history as intermediaries, middlemen, and go-betweens. By the seventeenth century, the coastal fortifications were also quite cosmopolitan contact settings where various Europeans speaking different languages and Africans interacted with each other in diverse languages, often without interpreters. Professional interpreters were needed particularly for expensive-commodity transactions. The chapter shows that contact between different populations and “brokers on the move” led to the emergence of new Portuguese varieties in the Cape Verdean archipelago and in Rios de Guiné, just like Portuguese itself had developed from the contact of populations migrating within the former Roman Empire.

By 1700, written Scots had largely disappeared from most printed text types. However, chapbooks – cheap booklets sold on the street from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Fox 2020: 386) – may have promoted Scots usage given their wide appeal, audience, and topic range. Thanks to the National Library of Scotland, a recently digitised collection of Scottish chapbooks has been made available to the public, representing a novel and invaluable resource that has not yet seen quantitative, linguistic analysis. To explore this under-researched time period and medium, we utilise the defoe tool (Filgueira Vicente et al. 2020b) to extract a large number of variable Scots tokens for statistical analysis. Our results indicate the persistence and prevalence of Scots features in imaginative prose, but also local news, which aligns with both historical and contemporary findings (Donaldson 1989a,b; Cruickshank 2017; Shoemark et al. 2017b) and suggests the continuity of Scots in print.

This study is a multivariate analysis seeking to identify semantic and syntactic factors influencing the alternation between to-infinitival and bare gerundial clauses in subject-control complements of the verb fear in contemporary American English. It builds on recent qualitative discussions of this alternation and recent multivariate analyses of similar binary alternations involving a prepositionally linked (rather than bare) gerundial option. We draw upon the American component of the Corpus of News on the Web, sampling subject-control complements from a period extending from the beginning of 2010 to the end of 2021. Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression provides varying degrees of support to numerous manifestations of the Complexity Principle, as well as strong support for the so-called Choice Principle. There is also low-quality evidence for a continuing diachronic decline of the to-infinitive.

Distributional approaches following the Firthian principle have revolutionized linguistics. While Firthian approaches in collocation research detect syntagmatic relations and are a key research area in corpus linguistics, Firthian distributional semantics and their neural counterpart of word embeddings detect paradigmatic relations and have fundamentally impacted computational linguistics. We combine these two closely related approaches: our hypothesis, following Ricoeur’s view of a metaphor as a clash of two normally distinct semantic fields, is that idioms are collocations in which the lexical participants typically have low semantic similarity in the word embedding space, i.e. low values for the cosine metric. We test if the cosine metric, replaceability with synonyms, and linear combinations with collocation measures improve idiom detection for three constructions: verb-PP, light verbs, and compound nouns. We report improved idiom detection by 10 to 80 per cent, and almost half of compound noun non-compositionality is predicted by cosine alone. We trace how compound nouns are changing in spoken and written English, mirroring digitalisation and the revolution of the internet.

In this chapter, the author puts forth the notion of “universal creolization” to undermine the false dichotomy between mixed and non-mixed languages. The premise of this position is that as no language evolves in a vacuum, but instead unavoidably comes into contact with other languages, all languages undergo varying degrees of language mixing. Reclaiming the word creolization to refer to language mixing (be it at the lexical, morphophonological, semantic, and syntactic levels) is a first step towards blurring up the false dichotomy between Creoles and non-Creoles or between mixed and non-mixed languages, effectively undercutting Creole Exceptionalism. This chapter promotes instead a uniformitarian approach to the study of Creoles and uses as evidence the diversity and variation within and across Creoles, as well as the processes they undergo in their development, similarly to all other languages. To illustrate universal creolization, we take as evidence the mixed nature of English, starting with Old English and finishing with Modern English. We unpack the Language Subordination framework to show how the false dichotomy between Creoles and non-Creoles may have first emerged.

This chapter presents the first genetic and areal study of copula systems in West African Pidgin (WAP). The typological analysis of the three WAP varieties Pichi (Equatorial Guinea), Cameroon Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin reveals a founder signal of their ancestor Krio (Sierra Leone) and its Yoruba substrate, plus an areal signal from the African adstrates and European superstrates in their respective ecologies. The strength of the founder signal increases in the order Ghanaian Pidgin < Cameroon Pidgin < Pichi. The areal signal follows the inverse order, reflective of differences in “social entrenchment,” a shorthand for the demographic strength of founder communities, differing social functions, and the extent of vernacularization of each variety. A qualitative and phylogenetic analysis reveals a rich functional and formal differentiation of nominal, locative, and property predication in West African Pidgin and its African adstrates. Despite different social histories, there is no evidence for pidginization or other types of “abnormal transmission” in the evolution of WAP. Instead, natural principles of genetic transmission, areal diffusion, and adaptation have colluded in shaping the copula systems of the WAP varieties in ways specific to each ecology.

This chapter defines data-intensive research in the context of the English language and explores its prospects. It argues that data intensiveness extends beyond a single digital method or the use of advanced statistical tools; rather it encompasses a broader transformation and fuller integration of digital tools and methods throughout the research process. We also address the potential pitfalls of data fetishism and over-reliance on data, and we draw parallels with the digital transformation in another discipline, specifically biosciences, to illustrate the fundamental changes proposed as a result of digitalization. The lessons learned from other fields underscore the need for increased multi- and interdisciplinary collaboration and the development of broader digital infrastructures. This includes investments in enhanced computing power, robust data management processes, and a greater emphasis on replicability and transparency in reporting methods, data, and analytical techniques.