ABSTRACT
Creoles and pidgins have attracted more and more attention among linguists since the 1970s. The number of research questions has increased from what kinds of restructuring processes account best for their emergence to whether the processes that explain these evolutions are unique to these new language varieties. While there have also been more studies of especially morphosyntactic features, debates have intensified about whether creoles in particular form a unique type of languages, with structural peculiarities that set them apart from (other) natural languages. Linguists have indeed been ambivalent about whether creoles are natural languages and whether the restructuring processes that have produced them are non-ordinary, unusual, or abnormal.
