Extraordinary Linguistic Forms

Pinker, pages 32 through the middle of page 36

  Languages can be traced back historically to language
families…
When did man  But, it cannot be stated exactly when it was that homo sapiens

develop developed the linguistic capacity.

 So, little is known about the way grammar evolved, how
language? original loose sounds became our symbolic system of
communication.
 Some world
languages can be
traced back
historically
  There was a sad historical event, terrible in all its ways, from
which linguistics can at least profit a bit.
However…  Slavery & Servitude
This map shows
the movement of
slaves in the past
Servitude was
typical in the
South Pacific
  Slaves belonging to different backgrounds and consequently
speaking mutually uninteligible languages were mixed on
What happened purpose.

linguistically?  As a result, and with the urgent need of survival, they had to
communicate with each other.
  Having to communicate
 Overnight
 Organise themselves to carry out practical tasks
 Having no time to learn each other’s language

What did this

cause?

PIDGIN LANGUAGE
  It consists of strings of words from the language of the
colonizers: English/ Spanish/ Portuguese/ French, etc
 i.e. they got the vocabulary from the main Western Languages

What is a mentioned before.

 BUT
PIDGIN ?  The pidgin has one main characteristic that turns it into a
special language.
 Which is the
PIDGIN’s
distinguishing  THE ABSENCE OF GRAMMAR.

feature?
 Believe it or not, it lacks the very property we have been
discussing as the single characteristic that distinguishes our
language from all other communication system.
  The answer is simple.
 A pidgin is an emergency language only used to solve a
practical task and then abandoned.

How is this  A Pidgin is NOBODY’S L1.

possible?  The users of the PIDGIN are already speakers of another L1,
which they do not share and which causes the NEED to
develop the PIDGIN.
 The users of the PIDGIN have already used up their UG.
  No consistent word order
 No prefixes
 No suffixes
 No tense
What is the  No temporal markers such as adverbs
PIDGIN like?  No structures like passive/ embedded clause/
 No linkers or logical connectors
 SEE bottom of page 33 for examples of the pidgin.
 BUT…there is
always  What happened to those pidgin forms after some years?
something in the
way of grammar
  And the little ones were exposed to the PIDGIN, they
transformed the grammar-less linguistic form into a full
language with its own grammatical complexity.
 BELIEVE IT OR NOT!!
 The pidgin became another extraordinary linguistic form.
When slaves
had children…

 A CREOLE
  Because it proves the Chomskyan Theory once more!!
 WHY?

Why is the  Because children exposed to a language without grammar

PIDGIN (a collection of voacbulary items) developed a
CREOLE CREOLE ( a linguistic form such as English or Spanish, or

extraordinary? Portuguese which served the same purposes as any language).

 SO… in the next slide you will find the one million dollar
question…
  PIDGIN NO GRAMMAR

Where did the  CHILD exposed to PIDGIN

children get the  Child develops CREOLE

 CREOLE= Pidgin+grammar
grammar from?
  Nature or Nurture?
 Outside the organism? Inside the organism?

Where is the  Is grammar external knowledge we must incorporate from the

input? Or Is grammar internal knowledge we have to trigger
grammar? by minimal input?
 I hope you have realised that the options in violet
correspond to the correct answers.
  As Pinker puts it, in other words, children of slaves could not
avoid developing an L1 from the pidgin… at the age they
would have normally developed their original tribal language…
Grammar is if their parents had not been taken to other territories as slaves.

inside us!  By mixing them, slave masters wanted to prevent them from
communicating…
 But language found the way…
  In some cases, after several years, Creoles became the language
of the place.

What is the  See examples of Hawaiian Creole at the bottom of page 34.

creole like?  Contrary to Pidgin, they contain: tense, embedded clauses,

clear word order, function words, etc. They are all grammatical
components.
  And, some speculations could be made about the uncertain
beginnings of the well known languages of today.

So, history gave  In the central paragraph of page 35, Pinker suggests that the
regular form of verbs in English could have evolved from the
us the chance to overuse of the verb did as in hammer-did=hammered.
see the birth of a  And, he also suggests that L1 speakers of English, when
language making initial mistakes such as: NOBODY DON’T LIKES ME,
are not really making a mistake but using patterns of one of the
world’s creoles.
  It has been proved by analysis of the structures that unrelated
Creoles from different parts of the world and from different
One more point languages exhibit great similarity.

about Creoles  This would emphasize once more the internal procedure the
brain goes through for language.
  Pinker has made a point of illustrating all along and even more
clearly with this topic of pidgins and creoles that our language
has the properties of:
 INNATENESS

ROUNDING  UNIVERSALITY
CREATIVITY
UP: Conclusion THE RESULT OF A NEED OR VITAL

1  INSTINCTIVE
SPONTANEOUS
 A FACT THAT HUMAN BEINGS CANNOT AVOID!!! Even
in the worst of circumstances!!
  The study of Pidgins and Creoles belongs to the subfield of
Linguistics known as SOCIOLINGUISTICS: the study of
language in relation to society and speech groups. (We will
discuss it in 4th).
CONCLUSIO  Chomsky’s theory belongs to FORMAL LINGUISTICS. The
N2 area of study that explores language in itself, as an object inside
the human brain.
 So, the study of these two extraordinary languages brought the
two extremes of Linguistics together.
  CHOMSKYAN LINGUISTICS

Rounding up
Pidgin & Creoles

SOCIOLINGUISTICS
 Pidgins &
Creoles in the
world
Creoles in the
world
  https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/149619.php
 https://www.uni-due.de/ELE/PidginsAndCreoles.htm

References of  https://ar.pinterest.com/pin/172262754467395277/

images.  https://consciousnet.org/illustrated-language-family-tree-shows
-relationship-between-many-of-the-worlds-languages
/