Bickerton

group one discussion on Bickerton reading

A **pidgin** or **pidgin language**, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language. A pidgin may be built from words, sounds, or body language from multiple other languages and cultures. Pidgins allow people or a group of people to communicate with each other without having any similarities in language and does not have any rules, as long as both parties are able to understand each other. A creole language is a stable, full-fledged language that originated from a pidgin or combination of other languages. So If I'm understanding correctly, a creole, becomes a language within a group that developed from a non formal language that doesn't have rules? I'm also just having a hard time getting a clear cut idea of what exactly this author believes to be the hypothesis. I gather there is some belief of language acquisition to be biological, yet not as complex as we once thought.~Ruby

Although if you substitute "Prior language" for Substratum and "Newly formed language" for Superstratum it makes a bit more sense, at least for me.
This article seems to connect to what we were discussing last week, about children being able to speak and understand without the constraints of adults. When children gorw up, depending on social feedback on their language it changes from what it once was, even though they had been understood before as well. It seems that Bickerton is saying that Creole and Pidgin is the childs language before it has been edited. Everyone who speaks it understands each other even though there are no rules but when you are studying it, it becomes very hard to decipher because it lacks order.

At the top of 174 is Bickerton assuming that the critical period hypothesis is correct? I just feel like that's a big assumption to base his research on...

One of the more interesting counterarguments to Bickerton's hypothesis, and to biologically deterministic theories of behavior in general, is the distinction Elizabeth Bates makes between universality of behavior and innateness. Few if any would argue that there are no biological underpinnings to language because we have all generally come to accept a materialist explanation for human cognition and consciousness. Its widely agreed upon that these phenomena originate in the brain, and are therefore ultimately the result of the evolutionary process. But that process occurred because of our species facing a set of more or less common problems. It may not be necessary to differentiate language acquisition or the formation of creoles from other cognitive and social phenomena because the environment (what Bates calls the "problem-space") presents us with a necessarily limited set of options, and that what looks like a poverty of stimulus could also be explained by our misunderstanding of the demands that the environment is making on the brain. The problem with this argument though is precisely what Bickerton states in his rebuttal: whats the alternative explanation? The empiricist argument starts to look like argument from ignorance. However the nativist theoretical model may offer explanatory power but it also lacks a certain testability until we know exactly what problem the generation of language is solving, although I admit that that question itself may be teleological. -Chris.