This chapter offers an overview of the controversies surrounding the study of creole syntax while evaluating representative studies. This overview includes proposals that cast creoles as a “type” of languages, proposals that view creoles as interlanguages and resulting from second language acquisition, and proposals that consider them as hybrid grammars yielding innovative feature recombinations due to language contact. It also discusses the benefits of the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, as it lays out a promising new direction in the investigation of pidgins and creoles by offering systematic comparisons of a large sample of creoles and their source languages. This collaborative Atlas provides broad empirical coverage, testing the hypotheses reflected by the various positions and schools of thought discussed in this chapter while unveiling the rich diversity of creole syntactic features.