CAS LX 400 Second Language AcquisitionThe standard storyPidginsImagine that’s what kids hearWhat kids seem to doBickertonSome innovationsSlide 8Slide 9Similarity across creolesSlide 11Slide 12Slide 13Pidgin + kid = creoleRelations to L2A questionsTwo commentsDeprivation of language inputSigned languagesNewport 1999Slide 20TopicalizationSlide 22SchumannSlide 24?Acculturation“Primacy of aspect”Vendlerian aspectual classesL1AL2ABardovi-Harlig 1995Slide 32Slide 33Slide 34Slide 35Where are we again?Week 13b. Pidgins and CreolesCAS LX 400Second Language AcquisitionThe standard story•Pidgin—verbal system used by linguistically diverse people stuck with the need to communicate.•Idea: Pidgins are unsystematic, simple, without distinctions of tense, modality, aspect, generally without word order restrictions, mainly just nouns and verbs, the bare minimum for moderately successful communication.Pidgins•Pidgins are not a natural language.•Hawaiian Pidgin English (HPE)…–You see, I got wood there; plenty men here no job, come steal.–Honolulu come; plenty more come; too much pineapple there.–No can. I try hard get good ones. Before, plenty duck; now, no more.–All ’ight, all ’ight, I go; all same, by’n bye Honolulu all Japanese.Imagine that’s what kids hear•Kids are little language acquisition machines. They abstract the regularity from the input, set parameters, have a grammar.•What if they have a pidgin for an input?•Idea: They’re getting non-language data. What is their LAD supposed to do with that?What kids seem to do•In fact, what seems to happen is that kids faced with pidgin input will impose structure on the input, will learn a language that doesn’t match what they hear.•The language kids grow up speaking has tense, aspect marking, has complex (embedded) sentences, and so forth.•Kids innovate language features. A creole.Bickerton•Bickerton’s hypothesis is that this is evidence of a bioprogram for language. Kids are built to learn a language, language has a structure, kids will learn a language even in the face of non-language input.•Roughly speaking, UG and LAD.Some innovations•HPE: S always before O (functional)•HCE: basically SVO, but allows other orders for pragmatic use.•HPE: definite/indefinite articles if at all used fairly randomly.•HCE: Definite da used for all and only known specific references. Indefinite wan used for all and only unknown specific references. Other NPs have no article. No marker of plurality.Some innovations•HCE: bin marks tense, go marks modality, stei marks aspect (i.e., -ed, will, -ing).•Wail wi stei paedl, jaen stei put wata insaid da kanu—hei, da san av a gan haed sink!‘While we were paddling, John was letting water into the canoe—hey, the son-of-a-gun had sunk it!’•As tu bin get had taim reizing dag.‘The two of us used to have a hard time raising dogs.’Some innovations•HCE: complementizers fo, go—–Mo beta a bin go hanalulu fo bai maiself.‘It would have been better if I’d gone to Honolulu to buy it myself.’–Ai gata go haia wan kapinta go fiks da fom.‘I had to hire a carpenter to fix the form.’•Where go=occurred, fo=hypothetical.Similarity across creoles•Movement (contrast, emphasis)–Not all languages do it the same way–Creoles all seem to use the same system•Jan bin sii wan uman. (GC)‘John had seen a woman.’•A Jan bin sii wan uman.‘It was John who had seen a woman.’•A wan uman Jan bin sii‘It was a woman that John had seen.’Similarity across creoles•Articles.–Widely varying article systems across languages.–Virtually all creoles do what HCE does:•Definite article for given-specific NP•Indefinite article for asserted-specific NP•Ø (no article) for nonspecific NPSimilarity across creoles•TMA systems–Preverbal free morphemes–Meanings (nearly?) identical•Tense = +Anterior–Past for stative verbs (‘was hungry’)–Past before past for action verbs (‘had walked’)–HCE bin, GC bin, SA bin, SR ben, HC te, LAC te•Modality = +Irrealis–Futures (‘will eat’) and conditionals (‘if we eat…’)–HCE go, GC sa/go, SA o, SR sa, GC ava, LAC ke•Aspect = +Nonpunctual–Prograssive/durative, habitual/iterative–HCE stei, GC a, SA ta, SR e, HC ape, LAC kaSimilarity across creoles•Complementizers sensitive to semantics–one for realized actions•HCE fo, JC f, SR foe, MC pu–one for hypothetical•HCE go, JC go, MC al/Ø, SR Ø–Im gann (fi/*go) bied, bot im duon bied (JC)‘He went to wash, but he didn’t wash.’Pidgin + kid = creole•Idea is that kid (LAD) filters the non-language input into a language system, resulting in a real human language, a creole.•Bickerton claims a creole is a nearly pure reflection of the “bioprogram”, of UG.•Evidence is that kids are going beyond the input in a way which is particularly clear.–Several authors have observed that the creolization situation really isn’t significantly different from normal language acquisition—kids with regular language input are still getting much less information than they’d need without UG.Relations to L2A questions•“Pidginization” arises in language contact. A communication system with nothing but the bare essentials.•On the surface this looks something like early interlanguages (and, really, what is a pidgin anyway?). Perhaps we can draw a parallel between early interlanguages and pidgins.•Schumann (1978) aimed to make this comparison between IL’s and pidgins.Two comments•The concept of pidgin that some authors are using may not be quite the same. Just to be clear:–A pidgin has no native speakers.–A pidgin is not a natural language.–A language with native speakers kind of based on a pidgin is a creole.•If L2A is like pidginization, note implications: kids, not adults, create a creole.Deprivation of language input•A fundamental piece of the pidgin-creole story is that kids innovate language-like features from input that doesn’t provide them with any.•We may wonder: Really?–Did the kid grow up in the marketplace?–Did neither parent speak their native language to the kid?–Clearly kids aren’t acquiring the pidgin, but might these innovations have other sources?Signed languages•However, perhaps a less contentious case: Deaf children born to hearing parents.•Here, there’s no issue of perhaps getting language input somewhere else. Where the parent doesn’t sign and the spoken language