Cultivating Ambiguity: Notes on Issues of Complexity in Creole Discourse

Abstract

This paper is a rejoinder to the dialogue concerning complexity and simplicity in pidgin and creole grammars. My position takes a chronotopic and unfinalized view of grammar, Bakhtinian notions that give crucial importance to temporal and spatial contexts in discussions about linguistic development-expansion and historicity of language use. I take a modular perspective and focus on a pragmatic component of grammar: ambiguity in discourse. Linguistic utterances that contain the phrasal verbs rip off and hot up are analyzed in the present study for their ambiguous[1], double-voicing features. My aim is to underscore the importance of recognizing double-voicing as a complex discursive strategy in Afro-Caribbean creole grammar. This feature and other non-salient, zero-marked constructions remain difficult to account for using current metrics of complexity versus simplicity. I invoke insights from Bakhtin and his theory of dialogism in the hope that it can aid our analysis of plurilingualism and the cultivation of ambiguity in creole discourse.

[1] Cultivating ambiguity is a term borrowed from Faraclas and The Working Group on the Agency of Marginalized Peoples in the Emergence of the Afro-Atlantic Creoles (2016).