Derek Bickerton | |
---|---|
Born | Cheshire, England | March 25, 1926
Died | March 5, 2018 91) | (aged
Alma mater | University of Cambridge (PhD 1976) |
Known for | work in creole languages |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Linguistics |
Institutions | University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa University of Leeds University of Guyana University of Cape Coast, Ghana |
Derek Bickerton (March 25, 1926 – March 5, 2018) was an English-born linguist and professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a feature of the human species. He is the originator and main proponent of the language bioprogram hypothesis according to which the similarity of creoles is due to their being formed from a prior pidgin by children who all share a universal human innate grammar capacity. [1]
Bickerton also wrote several novels. His novels have been featured in the works of the Sun Ra Revival Post Krautrock Archestra, through spoken word and musical themes.
Bickerton was born in Cheshire in 1926. [2] A graduate of the University of Cambridge, England in 1949, Derek Bickerton entered academic life in the 1960s, first as a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and then, after a year's postgraduate work in linguistics at the University of Leeds, as senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of Guyana (1967–71). For twenty-four years he was Associate Professor and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1972–96), having meanwhile received a PhD in linguistics in 1976 from the University of Cambridge. He is the father of contemporary artist Ashley Bickerton. His other children are Julie Bickerton Bravata and Jim Bickerton.
To answer questions about creole formation, in the late 1970s Bickerton proposed an experiment that involves marooning on an island six couples speaking six different languages, along with children too young to have acquired their parents’ languages. The National Science Foundation deemed the proposed experiment unethical and refused to fund it. [1]
In his book Roots of Language (1981), Bickerton poses three questions: 1) How did creole languages originate? 2) How do children acquire language? 3) How did the language faculty originate as a feature of the human species?
In Language and Species (1990), he suggests that all three questions might be answered by postulating that the origin of language can be traced to the evolution of representation systems and symbolic thinking, together with a later development of formal syntax. Using primitive communication faculties, which then evolved in parallel, mental models became shared representations subject to cultural evolution. In Lingua ex Machina (2000), he and William Calvin revise this speculative theory by considering the biological foundations of symbolic representation and their influence on the evolution of the brain.
In his memoir Bastard Tongues (2008), he describes himself as a "street linguist" who emphasizes field work, with a "total lack of respect for the respectable", [1] and he outlines his theories for a general audience.
In Adam’s Tongue (2009), he makes an argument about the origin of language which relies on niche construction to supply the required evolutionary catalyst. He claims that human language is not on a continuum with animal communication systems (ACSs) but is a qualitatively different communicative system. Animal communication systems are only indexical, restricted to conveying information about immediate circumstances insofar as these impinge upon individual survival, reproduction, and social relations. Human language, on the other hand, is capable of spatial and temporal displacement.
Bickerton argues that peculiar features characterizing the ecological niche of early man allowed for this breakthrough from an ACS into language. He cites the fact that around two million years ago our ancestors were finding their way to the top of a scavenging pyramid, accessing the carcasses of megafauna before other predators and holding them off by working in coordinated groups. By imitating an animal, like a mammoth, one member could attempt to communicate information about such food sources. Although such imitative signaling retained an iconic character rather than fully symbolic, they involved an act of displacement in communication since the body could be miles away and discovered hours earlier. Over time, the sounds signifying something like a mammoth would be decontextualized and come to resemble something much more closely resembling a word. Displacement, Bickerton claims, is the hallmark feature of language.
In Bickerton's view, these words allowed the formation of concepts rather than mere categories that animals are also capable of. Words began as the anchors for sensory information and memories about a specific animal or object. Once the brain had words it could create concepts which came together as a 'protolanguage'. The protolanguage remained much like a pidgin for a million years or more, eventually it went from the "beads-on-a-string" model of speech to a hierarchical structure through Merge. Bickerton died in March 2018 at the age of 91. [3]
Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked with evolutionary anthropology, cognitive linguistics and biolinguistics. Studying languages as the products of nature, it is interested in the biological origin and development of language. Evolutionary linguistics is contrasted with humanistic approaches, especially structural linguistics.
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.
A pidgin, or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside.
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare, and the theory of universal grammar remains controversial among linguists.
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form, and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar. Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.
A lingua franca, also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages.
Tok Pisin, often referred to by English speakers as New Guinea Pidgin or simply Pidgin, is an English creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an official language of Papua New Guinea and the most widely used language in the country. However, in parts of the southern provinces of Western, Gulf, Central, Oro, and Milne Bay, the use of Tok Pisin has a shorter history and is less universal, especially among older people.
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.
In functional-cognitive linguistics, as well as in semiotics, iconicity is the conceived similarity or analogy between the form of a sign and its meaning, as opposed to arbitrariness. The principle of iconicity is also shared by the approach of linguistic typology.
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language is a 1994 book by Steven Pinker, written for a general audience. Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. He deals sympathetically with Noam Chomsky's claim that all human language shows evidence of a universal grammar, but dissents from Chomsky's skepticism that evolutionary theory can explain the human language instinct.
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal communication. Many argue for the close relation between the origins of language and the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the facts and implications of this connection.
In addition to its classical and modern literary form, Malay had various regional dialects established after the rise of the Srivijaya empire in Sumatra, Indonesia. Also, Malay spread through interethnic contact and trade across the south East Asia Archipelago as far as the Philippines. That contact resulted in a lingua franca that was called Bazaar Malay or low Malay and in Malay Melayu Pasar. It is generally believed that Bazaar Malay was a pidgin, influenced by contact among Malay, Hokkien, Portuguese, and Dutch traders.
In linguistics, relexification is a mechanism of language change by which one language changes much or all of its lexicon, including basic vocabulary, with the lexicon of another language, without drastically changing the relexified language's grammar. The term is principally used to describe pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages.
In historical or evolutionary linguistics, monogenesis and polygenesis are two different hypotheses about the phylogenetic origin of human languages. According to monogenesis, human language arose only once in a single community, and all current languages come from the first original tongue. On the other hand, according to polygenesis, human languages came into being in several communities independently, and current tongues derived from different sources.
A post-creole continuum is a dialect continuum of varieties of a creole language between those most and least similar to the superstrate language. Due to social, political, and economic factors, a creole language can decreolize towards one of the languages from which it is descended, aligning its morphology, phonology, and syntax to the local standard of the dominant language but to different degrees depending on a speaker's status.
The language bioprogram theory or language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH) is a theory arguing that the structural similarities between different creole languages cannot be solely attributed to their superstrate and substrate languages. As articulated mostly by Derek Bickerton, creolization occurs when the linguistic exposure of children in a community consists solely of a highly unstructured pidgin; these children use their innate language capacity to transform the pidgin, which characteristically has high syntactic variability, into a language with a highly structured grammar. As this capacity is universal, the grammars of these new languages have many similarities.
According to the theory of monogenesis in its most radical form, all pidgins and creole languages of the world can be ultimately traced back to one linguistic variety. This idea was first formulated by Hugo Schuchardt in the late 19th century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Taylor (1961) and Thompson (1961). It assumes that some type of pidgin language, dubbed West African Pidgin Portuguese, based on Portuguese was spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the forts established by the Portuguese on the West African coast. This variety was the starting point of all the pidgin and creole languages. This would explain to some extent why Portuguese lexical items can be found in many creoles, but more importantly, it would account for the numerous grammatical similarities shared by such languages.
Nativization is the process through which in the virtual absence of native speakers, a language undergoes new phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic and stylistic changes, and gains new native speakers. This happens necessarily when a second language used by adult parents becomes the native language of their children. Nativization has been of particular interest to linguists, and to creolists more specifically, where the second language concerned is a pidgin.
In linguistics, displacement is the capability of language to communicate about things that are not immediately present ; i.e., things that are either not here or are not here now.
Susanne Maria Michaelis is a specialist in creole linguistics who is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. She was previously at Leipzig University and at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena.