Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Preliminaries
- Part II Correlate windows
- Part III Analogue windows
- 5 Incipient pidgins and creoles
- 6 Homesign systems and emergent sign languages
- 7 Modern motherese
- 8 Hunter-gatherers’ use of language
- 9 Language acquisition
- Part IV Abduction windows
- Part V Epilogue
- Notes
- References
- Index
5 - Incipient pidgins and creoles
from Part III - Analogue windows
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Preliminaries
- Part II Correlate windows
- Part III Analogue windows
- 5 Incipient pidgins and creoles
- 6 Homesign systems and emergent sign languages
- 7 Modern motherese
- 8 Hunter-gatherers’ use of language
- 9 Language acquisition
- Part IV Abduction windows
- Part V Epilogue
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
‘The nearest thing to protolanguage’
The idea that pidgins can serve as a window on language evolution is not a new one: it has been entertained over the years by linguists of various theoretical persuasions. More than twenty years ago Derek Bickerton, for example, depicted the ‘language’ of pidgin speakers as one of the
living linguistic fossils … that would give us some insight into the processes through which language emerged. (Bickerton 1990: 106)
Recently, he has once again expressed his belief in the capacity of pidgins to shed light on the evolution of language, asserting amongst other things that
a pidgin is the nearest thing to protolanguage that we're going to find in the modern world. (Bickerton 2009a: 224)
protolanguage, after perhaps a million years or more, would have looked something like a pidgin. (Bickerton 2009a: 230)
Bickerton, moreover, tells his readers – and specifically those who had to create a rudimentary pidgin for communicating during travel in a foreign country – that
[t]hat's the nearest you or I or anyone will ever come to feeling what things were like at the dawn of language. (Bickerton 2009a: 39)
Talmy Givón is another long-standing proponent of the idea that pidgins can be a source of evidence about language evolution. Thus as early as 1979, he considered a second-language pidgin to be ‘one of the fossils of language’ that can be used for ‘reconstructing the course of language evolution’ (Givón 2009: 241). And thirty years later, he has reaffirmed this view by asserting that
there is no reason to refrain from considering pre-grammatical pidgins – whether in children or in adults – as a legitimate analog to a distinct stage in language evolution. (Givón 2009: 318)
This remark by Givón is also indicative of the type of windows instantiated by the pidgin window: it is an analogue window. That is, the inferential step from properties of pidgins to properties of an evolutionarily earlier stage of language represents analogical inference.
The window potential of pidgins has been probed by scholars other than Bickerton and Givón as well. They include Peter Bakker (2003), Rudolf Botha (2006a), Tecumseh Fitch (2010), Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva (2004, 2007), Ray Jackendoff (1999, 2002), Salikoko Mufwene (2007, 2008), Sonia Ragir (2002), Paul Roberge (2009, 2012) and Dan Slobin (2004). Judgements of that potential vary from cautiously positive to wholly negative.
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- Information
- Language EvolutionThe Windows Approach, pp. 83 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016