The formation of a new language.
Subtitle: From pidgin to creolo.
Edition: ©2009  (Standard Copyright License)
Publisher: Lulu
Published: December 14, 2009
Place of publication: Italy
Number of pages: 29
Subjects: Linguistic
First sentence: The consequences (of this study)are clear: it is no longer true that there are no natural languages easier or more natural than others. On the contrary, all children in all parts of the world are biologically inclined to speak at first some form of creole instantiation, while the cultural contexts sometimes deviates this natural inclination. In other words, creoles are the most natural among natural languages. The study of creole abstraction passes through the finding of the universals of creolization, which let linguists approach directly the elements of syntactic structures, as well as the semantic bounds, of the emergence of language.
Description: Last research results by Bickerton (2008) in the field of creolization challenge Chomsky's (1987) notion of language faculty, which is widely accepted by the majority of linguists. In particular, Bickerton considers pidgins as the first stage of the ontogenetic emergence of language, creols being the final stage — with some intermediate stages between. We put Bickerton's approach of considering the emergence of language as a complex biological program a step forward. In fact, our thesis is that creolization is valid both at an ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels. In other words, we argue that, in some way, these stages represent — at the best approximation we can experimentally study — the original language of the human species.
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