The Evolution of Language: Hints from Creoles and Pidgins
نویسنده
چکیده
The subtitle of this essay should not be interpreted in the way suggested by Bickerton (1990, 1995, 2002) or Givón (1998). Creoles can inform our research on the evolution of language not because there is anything empirically exceptional or unusual about the way they emerged (see, e.g., DeGraff 2003, 2005) but because the multitude of facts that we have learned over the past couple of decades about their development has drawn our attention to the kinds of ecological factors that should have informed any sound genetic linguistics (Mufwene 2001, 2005, 2008). Much of recent research has shown that these new language varieties are largely a legacy of 17th and 18th-century European vernaculars spoken in the colonies around the Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean. They have reintegrated, on the model of gene recombination in biology and under the influence of various African substrate languages (and sometimes with elements imported from these), structural materials from diverse varieties of their lexifiers (see, e.g., Chaudenson 2001, 2003 in the case of French creoles). They also emerged gradually, illustrating the piecemeal way in which selection resolved competition in language contact settings where the language of the economically powerful (among other factors) had selective advantage. Quite significantly from the point of view of evolution, the literature on creole continua reminds us that languages as communal phenomena are constructed from idiolects, that boundaries are
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تاریخ انتشار 2008