my children had learned to make sense of the initially incomprehensible babble of adult sound coming at them, to recognize groupings of syllables into words, and to realize which groupings constituted underlying words despite variations of pronunciation within and between adult speakers.
Such difficulties convinced Chomsky that children learning their first language would face an impossible task unless much of language's structure were already pre-programmed into them. Hence Chomsky reasoned that we are born with a 'universal grammar' already wired into °ur brains to give us a spectrum of grammatical models encompassing the range of grammars in actual languages. This pre-wired universal grammar would be like a set of switches, each with various alternative positions. The switch positions would then become fixed to match the grammar of the local language that the growing child hears. However, Bickerton goes further than Chomsky and concludes that we are pre-programmed not just to a universal grammar with adjustable switches, but to a particular set of switch settings: the settings that surface again and again in Creole grammars. The pre- programmed settings can be overridden if they turn out to conflict with what a child hears in the local language around it. But if a child hears no local switch settings at all because it grows up amidst the structureless anarchy of pidgin language, the Creole settings can persist.
If Bickerton is correct in that we really are pre-programmed at birth with Creole settings that can be overridden by later experience, then one would expect children to learn creole-like features of their local language earlier and more easily than features conflicting with Creole grammar. This reasoning might explain the notorious difficulty of English-speaking children in learning how to express negatives: they insist on creole-like double negatives such as 'Nobody don't have this'. The same reasoning could explain the difficulties of English-speaking children with word order in questions.
To pursue the latter example, English happens to be among the languages that uses the Creole word order of subject, verb, and object for statements: for instance, 'I want juice'. Many languages, including Creoles, preserve this word order in questions, which are merely distinguished by altered tone of voice ('You want juice? ). However, the English language does not treat questions in this way. Instead, our questions deviate from Creole word order by inverting the subject and verb ('Where are you? , not 'Where you are? ), or by placing the subject between an auxiliary verb (such as 'do') and the main verb ('Do you want juice? ). My wife and I have been barraging my sons from early infancy onwards with grammatically correct English questions as well as statements. My sons quickly picked up the correct order for statements, but both of them are still persisting in the incorrect creole-like order for questions, despite the hundreds of correct examples that my wife and I utter for them every day. Today's samples from Max and Joshua include 'Where it is? , 'What that letter is? , 'What the handle can do? , and 'What you did with it? . It is as if they are not yet ready to accept the evidence of their ears, because they are still convinced that their pre-programmed creole-like rules are correct.
I have discussed Creoles as if they appeared only with the rise of colonialism in the past 500 years. In fact, the social conditions that produced modern Creoles have arisen repeatedly during thousands of years of documented human history, and probably long before that. Hence some of the world's 'normal' languages may have passed through stages of creolization and gradually re-evolved a more complex grammar. The possible example closest to home is the language of these pages. There has been a long controversy among linguists over the history of the Germanic language family that includes English, and that presumably arose in the area of the Baltic Sea. As I shall discuss in Chapter Fifteen, Germanic languages belong to a wider grouping of languages termed Indo-European. All Indo-European languages clearly derived much of their vocabulary and grammar from an ancestral language known as proto-Indo-European, which may have been spoken in southern Russia 5,000 years ago and then spread west across Europe. However, the Germanic languages also include many word roots and grammatical features unique to them, and absent from all other Indo-European families. Familiar examples include the English words 'house', 'wife', and 'hand', close to the modern German words
A further step towards Shakespeare is exemplified by two-year-old children, who in all human societies proceed spontaneously from a one-word to a two-word stage and then to a multi-word one. But those multi-word utterances are still mere word strings with little grammar, and their words are still nouns, verbs, and adjectives with concrete referents. As Bickerton points out, those word strings are rather like the pidgin languages that human adults spontaneously reinvent when necessary. They also resemble the strings of symbols produced by captive apes whom we have instructed in the use of those symbols.
From pidgins to Creoles, or from the word strings of two-year-olds to the complete sentences of four- year-olds, is another giant step. In that step were added words lacking external referents and serving purely grammatical functions; elements of grammar such as word order, prefixes and suffixes, and word root variation; and more levels of hierarchical organization to produce phrases and sentences. Perhaps that step is what triggered the Great Leap Forward discussed in Chapter Two. Nevertheless, Creole languages reinvented in modern times still give us clues to how these advances arose, through the Creoles' circumlocutions to express prepositions and other grammatical elements. As another illustration of how this might have happened, my Indonesian colleague and I were just in the process of reinventing prepositions when the helicopter picked us up and terminated our experiment in pidgin evolution. We had begun to assemble word strings that functioned as locative prepositional phrases but were still composed solely of nouns with concrete referents—strings such as 'spoon top plate' and 'spoon bottom plate', to mean that the spoon was on or under the plate. Many virtual prepositions in Neo-Melanesian, Indonesian, and other Creoles are similarly constructed.
If you compare the Neo-Melanesian advertisement on pages 150-51 with a Shakespearean sonnet, you might conclude that a huge gap still exists. In fact, I would argue that, with an advertisement like
Animal communication and human language once seemed to be separated by an unbridgeable gulf. Now, we have identified not only parts of the bridges starting from both shores, but also a series of islands and bridge segments spaced across the gulf. We are beginning to understand in broad outline how the most unique and important attribute that distinguishes us from animals arose from animal precursors.
Try to understand this Neo-Melanesian advertisement for a department store:
