The Lexical Competence Hypothesis: A cognitive account ... - CiteSeerX

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Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 18:1. 1-79 (2003).  John Benjamins B.V., Amsterdam Not to be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

THE LEXICAL COMPETENCE HYPOTHESIS: A COGNITIVE ACCOUNT OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VERNACULARIZATION AND GRAMMATICAL EXPANSION IN CREOLIZATION 1

Carla L. Hudson and Inge-Marie Eigsti University of Rochester

Incipient and basic pidgins typically lack grammatical/functional structures (GFS) and have little in the way of complex sentence structures (CSSs). Over time, however, pidgins may expand and gain GFS and CSSs. Researchers have linked this expansion to the social process of vernacularization. We propose that this expansion actually results from a cognitive process driven by vernacularization, namely increased lexical competence. Lexical competence is a speaker’s facility with the content lexical items in a language, and includes overall vocabulary size as well as ease of lexical access. Speakers with high competence are predicted to use more GFS and CSS than speakers with low competence. Importantly, frequent of use of the language increases competence. Vernacularization includes increased use; thus, as the lexical competence of its speakers increases more GFS and CSS emerge in their speech. We conducted a short-term language creation experiment to test this hypothesis. Results show that as participants’ lexical competence increased, so did the amount of GFS

1 Some of the data in this paper previously appeared in a poster presented at the 1999 Biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. This study was supported in part by NIH grant DC00167 to E. L. Newport, an NSERC PGS-B to C. L. Hudson, NIMH Dissertation Research Grant R03 MH61032-01 and Language Learning Small Grant Award to I.-M. Eigsti. We thank Elissa L. Newport for her feedback and support in the design of this experiment, and Richard Aslin, Marie Coppola, Darlene Lacharité, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Carla L. Hudson, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Meliora Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected].

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CARLA L. HUDSON AND INGE-MARIE EIGSTI and CSS in their speech, supporting the proposed relationship between lexical competence and the expression of grammatical structures. KEYWORDS: creole genesis, pidgin and creole languages, artificial language, second language acquisition, language acquisition, vernacularization, memory, language production

Early pidgins are typically described as having a small lexicon, no formal categories such as grammatical gender, no number, tense or inflectional morphology, and few if any embedded clause structures (Bakker, 1995; Bickerton, 1981; DeCamp, 1977; Hall, 1966; McWhorter, 1997; Mühlhäusler, 1986; Romaine, 1988; Sebba, 1997; Todd, 1974). In short, early pidgins, while useful for communication in the often limited situations in which they are used, do not contain many additional linguistic devices. Over time, however, pidgins may change, acquiring larger lexicons as well as grammatical features such as tense, aspect, number marking, and embedded or relative clauses (Bakker, 1995; Bickerton, 1981; DeCamp, 1977; McWhorter, 1997; Mühlhäusler, 1986; Romaine, 1988; Sebba, 1997; Todd, 1974). The challenge is to explain these differences. That is, where did particular structures come from, and how and when did they enter the language? Current theories of expansion emphasize the role of vernacularization in the transition from early, basic pidgin to creole, and the accompanying structural expansion (e.g. Mühlhäusler, 1986; Thomason, 1997). (Following scholars such as McWhorter (1997) and Siegel (1997), we are using the term creole to refer to both nativized creoles like Hawaiian Creole English, and expanded pidgins such as Tok Pisin. We realize that this practice is not uncontroversial: see, for instance, Mufwene (1997)). In this paper we argue that the vernacularization explanation captures a primarily social phenomenon, and propose that a cognitive process resulting from vernacularization – increased lexical competence (the size of a speaker’s vocabulary and the fluency of its use) – is what actually underlies the grammatical expansion. The increased use of the language resulting from vernacularization leads to increased lexical competence, which in turn frees up processing resources and allows for the greater expression of grammatical/functional structure (GFS) (such as tense or aspect) and the use of more complex sentence structures (CSSs). After presenting the details of the model, we present the results of a short-term language creation experiment that support the proposed relationship between lexical competence and the overt expression of GFS. Vernacularization drives

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LEXICAL COMPETENCE AND GRAMMATICAL EXPANSION

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expansion, but, we propose, increased lexical competence is the mechanism by which it occurs.

Pidgins Pidgin languages typically emerge in situations of contact between speakers of multiple languages who do not share a language but need to communicate with each other (Bakker, 1995; Hall, 1966; McWhorter, 1997; Mühlhäusler, 1986; Romaine, 1988; Sebba, 1997; Todd, 1974). The arena of usage is usually limited; for example, the language is used only in trading contacts between the groups. Pidgin lexicons are typically small, consisting mostly of words used in the restricted context in which the pidgin developed. For instance, a pidgin developed among trading communities may have words for the activities involved in trading as well as the particular items usually traded, but would be unlikely to have words for other things such as religious beliefs and ceremonies. Pidgins are also characterized by their relative grammatical simplification, as compared to the languages present in the pidgin formation situation, the lexifier language(s) and the native languages (L1s) of the pidgin creators. They often lack formal categories such as grammatical gender, number, tense and inflectional morphology, and few if any embedded clause structures. (Although when L1s of the creators are grammatically similar, the resultant pidgin may evince some of these more purely grammatical features, albeit to a lesser extent than the L1s). Despite this, pidgins are not agrammatical; they do have structural norms, and once stabilized, pidgins must be learned by new speakers like any other language. An important feature of pidgins is that they are second (or other) languages for the majority of their speakers. Pidgins may die out if their usefulness wanes and they cease to be used. This happened, for instance, to Russenorsk and Chinook Jargon in the previous century. This fate is not inevitable, however. Sometimes what occurs is quite the opposite; the pidgin expands both lexically and grammatically. It is this grammatical expansion that is the focus of the present paper.

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CARLA L. HUDSON AND INGE-MARIE EIGSTI

Theories of Grammatical Expansion In one of the earliest explicit theories of creole formation, Bickerton (1981, 1984, 1988) proposed that nativization is responsible for the structural expansion of a pidgin into a creole. He suggested that when children are exposed to a structurally impoverished and inconsistent pidgin as their primary linguistic input, they fail to learn from it. Instead, the deficient input triggers their innate knowledge of linguistic structure and a sort of default language emerges. According to Bickerton, adults do not have full access to the Bioprogram, and so pidgins should not expand in similar ways without nativization. However, some pidgin languages, such as Tok Pisin, have expanded and developed features such as morphological causatives, number marking, and complementizers without nativization (Aitchison, 1989b; Keesing, 1988; Sankoff, 1979), suggesting that at the very least, children are not necessary for structural expansion. An alternative theory of creolization that emerged partially in response to cases such as Tok Pisin proposes that vernacularization, the acceptance and use of a language in many different contexts and types of interactions, leads to structural expansion (McWhorter, 1997; Mühlhäusler, 1986; Sankoff, 1979; Thomason, 1997; Thomason & Kaufman, 1988). A language without tense and aspect marking, relative clauses, or number marking (some examples of GFSs early pidgins often lack) is thought to be inadequate to serve as a primary vehicle of communication for a community of users (Labov, 1990). When speakers begin to use the language to talk about things like religion, make small talk, or to make jokes with one another, they have an increased utility for things which help to organize discourse (such as deictics to more effectively track participants and time), as well as means to encode stylistic and sociolinguistic distinctions.2 Thus, when a language becomes a vernacular it expands in order to serve the increasing needs of the speech community.

2 We use the phrase “increased utility” specifically to avoid the word need, since many languages lack the features which commonly develop in pidgin/creole languages, indicating that things like tense/aspect marking and relative clauses are not necessary for successful communication, and further, that they therefore cannot be universally specified characteristics of human language. (They may, of course, be universally constrained by something like UG when they do appear. But universally constrained is different from universally specified).

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One possible route to vernacularization has already been mentioned, nativization. An early pidgin that serves as input for first language (L1) acquisition by children often expands, since in becoming an L1 it becomes a vernacular for the community of new native speakers.3 The English-lexified creole in Hawaii (HCE) is one example of a pidgin/creole language that expanded concurrent with nativization. Roberts (1998) provides numerous examples of structures first attested in the speech of the first generation of native speakers of HCE. For example, stei used as a progressive marker is not attested in speech samples attributed to non-native speakers of the pidgin, first showing up in a sample of the speech of school children who presumably were native-born. Chinook Jargon is another pidgin that expanded concurrent with nativization (Grant, 1996; Zenk, 1984). But vernacularization can also occur without nativization. There are two primary types of vernacularization without nativization, expanded pidgins and abrupt creoles. In both types an expansion in the arenas of usage occurs primarily among adult, rather than child, speakers. In expanded pidgins, use of the language becomes less restricted over time. It is used in increased social contexts and for an increasing range of topics, gradually replacing native languages in more and more arenas of usage en route to becoming a primary language of a community of adult speakers. Tok Pisin is a well-known example of an expanded pidgin. Tok Pisin likely descended from a wide-spread South Pacific pidgin that arose among the South Pacific Islanders who were working as laborers on plantations or as hands on ships (Keesing, 1988; Sankoff & Laberge, 1973). It served as a means to communicate with their European overseers, shipmates, and trading partners, as well as with other islanders. The variety that spread to New Guinea gained more importance over time, eventually becoming a lingua franca in the cities. At present, Tok Pisin is one of New Guinea’s official languages (Sankoff & Laberge, 1973). It is often used in the media, and is the primary language used in Parliament. Several changes in the grammar of Tok Pisin, affecting both the nature 3 M¨ uhlhäusler (1986) points out that the mere presence of a few children might not be enough to create a situation where the pidgin becomes a true vernacular, and that even if it does become a vernacular for the children, not all innovations contributed by the children will be maintained in the pidgin/creole language. Instead, the success of the children’s innovations depends on a variety of factors, especially the proportion of children in the population of speakers; if there are few children present, then their innovations are unlikely to have a great impact on the language.

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and frequency of use of several functional categories, have been documented alongside the changing status of the language (see Sankoff, 1979, for a review). For instance, the predicate marker i first appears in texts from the late 19th century, and seems to have become grammaticized by 1920–1930, well prior to the occurrence of any substantial nativization (Sankoff, 1979, 1994).4 Importantly, in places where Tok Pisin did not become the local vernacular it remained unexpanded (Mühlhäusler, 1986; Keesing, 1988), indicating that the expansion was not just a consequence of the language having been used for such a long period of time. Some changes have occurred in Tok Pisin subsequent to recent nativization (Aitchison, 1996; Sankoff, 1994). However, they are primarily morphophonological, and likely result from the faster rate of speech of the native speakers (Sankoff, 1994; cf. Samarin, 1997, for an alternative view of the differences between native and non-native speakers of a pidgin/creole language and their causes). The other form of vernacularization without nativization is abrupt creolization. In abrupt creolization the new language becomes a primary language almost immediately, never passing through a real pidgin stage (Lefebvre, 1998; Mufwene, 1997; Siegel, 1997; Thomason & Kaufman, 1988). In cases of abrupt vernacularization, speakers have an immediate utility for grammatical devices, causing them to emerge quickly. The French-lexified Haitian Creole is one example of an abrupt creole (Lefebvre, 1993, 1998; Thomason & Kaufman, 1988). Haitian Creole, as it is currently spoken by speakers of some dialects, contains many structures similar in form to the West African language Fongbe (Lefebvre, 1992, 1996, 1998). Fongbe speakers were numerically dominant among the slaves fairly early on (Singler, 1993, 1996), meaning that these Fongbe-influenced structures likely entered the language early on. If their emergence was coincident with vernacularization, then logically, vernacularization occurred much earlier in the history of Haitian Creole than it did in the history of Tok Pisin. In all three cases discussed above (HCE, Tok Pisin, and Haitian Creole), the languages share similar features despite the fact that the situations in

4 While the predicate-marker analysis of i is the most common one, as one reviewer pointed out it is not the only analysis of i. Keesing (1988), for instance, analyses it as a pronominal form based on similar forms in the Oceanic languages (which were substrates of the Melanesian Pidgin from which Tok Pisin likely descended). This distinction is not, however, central to the issues addressed in this paper and so will not be discussed further.

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which they developed differed (Romaine, 1988). In the case of HCE, vernacularization occurred through (or alongside) nativization; in Haitian Creole, it resulted from adult slaves immediately adopting a newly emerging language as their primary language; and in Tok Pisin, it was the result of adults using the pidgin in more and more situations over time. The vernacularization hypothesis unites these similar outcomes by positing that the grammatical and structural expansion of creolization results from vernacularization in all three instances.

The Missing Mechanism Language is a cognitive process. While it is undoubtedly true that individual languages, and the occurrence of changes in them, are influenced and shaped a great deal by social factors, ultimately, the factors constraining language, and therefore development and change in individual languages, should be derivable from principles of human cognition (Chomsky, 1957, 1959, 1965). (These principles may be domain-specific, such as principles of syntax, but they need not be.) This is essentially a distinction between cause and mechanism. Social factors can cause changes to occur in languages, but exactly how the change occurs, and why the change takes the particular form it does, are a function of, and dependant on, the mechanism(s) involved in the process. The current vernacularization hypothesis is a primarily a label for a social phenomenon. It describes the reasons for grammatical expansion – why it occurs at all. However, there is no explanation for why or how increased social function relates to increased grammatical complexity at a cognitive level. The vernacularization hypothesis proposes that changes at the level of a community of speakers result in changes at the level of individuals’ grammars. But if changes are occurring in individuals’ grammars, then some mechanism must be acting at the level of the individual to produce these changes, some mechanism within the minds of individuals – a cognitive mechanism. In its current form, however, the vernacularization hypothesis provides no explanation at the level of the individual. Thus, while the vernacularization hypothesis is consistent with the facts as we currently understand them, it is not, we submit, fully explanatory. The Lexical Competence Hypothesis provides a cognitive mechanism linking vernacularization to expansion at the level of the individual. It offers an explanation based

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on models of memory and sentence production for how increased use of a language might lead to increased use of GFS and CSS by speakers (and this explanation itself provides the why). In this way, the Lexical Competence Hypothesis adds an important new element to the vernacularization hypothesis.

THE CURRENT PROPOSAL Our proposal, the Lexical Competence Hypothesis, posits a strong, positive relationship between a speaker’s knowledge of the vocabulary of a language, particularly the content words, and the complexity of sentences and amount of GFS a speaker produces. Like any other cognitive process, language production requires cognitive resources. When resources are taxed such that there are not enough to go around, something must suffer. According to models of language production content words are accessed first during the production process (Aitchison, 1989a; Bock, 1995; Carroll, 1994). When this first step of the production process is difficult it can interfere with subsequent aspects of production such as the access of GFS and the construction of complex sentences. In this way knowledge of content words can affect the production of GFS and CSSs. A major contributor to increased facility with the lexicon (hereafter referred to as lexical competence) is time spent speaking the language, so that speakers who use a language with greater regularity will have higher degrees of lexical competence. This increased lexical competence allows for greater production of GFS and CSSs. Likewise, more limited use results in more limited lexical competence, and limited lexical competence results in lower rates of GFS and CSS production. This predicts that languages spoken on an irregular basis will be characterized by less GFS and simpler sentences. It also predicts that as a language is spoken with increasing frequency, production of GFS will increase, as will the complexity of sentences produced by speakers. In this way, pidgins are predicted to have less GFS and few CSSs due to cognitive, rather than purely social, factors. By the same token, as a language takes on more functions (i.e. undergoes vernacularization), speakers use it more. Accordingly, their lexical competence increases. Thus, we would expect to see the emergence of increased GFS and CSSs alongside vernacularization, and therefore in expanded pidgins and nativized creoles.

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And in a language that is a vernacular from its beginnings, speakers quickly achieve high levels of lexical competence and we would therefore expect the presence of GFS and CSS early on in the language’s history, as is the case in abrupt creoles. The Lexical Competence Hypothesis is based on models of memory and sentence production. Below, we describe these models in more detail, highlighting features important to our hypothesis. We then proceed to outline the specifics of our proposal in greater detail, along with the implications of our proposal for theories of pidgin and creole formation. Background for the Lexical Competence Hypothesis Models of Memory Theories of memory typically divide memory into two main theoretical components, working memory and long-term memory (Baddeley, 1992; Baddeley & Logie, 1999; although see papers in Miyake & Shah, 1999, for alternative models of memory). Working memory encompasses what used to be called short-term memory, as well a control function that directs the various operations involved in using memory. The memory component is further divided into modality-specific short-term storage areas. The best-known (and most-studied) are typically referred to as the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketch-pad. The control function, often called the central executive, accesses information in long-term memory, activating it for use in on-line processing, manages processing capacity and resources, and may also be involved in directing attention. (It is presently unclear whether these are conducted by a single unitary control function, or whether there are multiple independent control functions). Current theories of memory also differ from older theories in how memory is thought to be constrained. Schacter (1996), for instance, describes memory in terms of processing power and resources rather than storage space, and memory limitations as limits on those resources. According to Schacter, an inability to remember something is due to a lack of sufficient processing power (needed to access the memory), rather than a lack of space. Extending this idea, when we are simultaneously engaged in more than one cognitive task, resources are taxed and processing is less efficient. Practice can alleviate the high cognitive load required by a new task so that over

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time less cognitive resources are devoted to its execution. This change is called automatization. Driving is an example of a complex task that becomes automatized over time. At first, driving is a difficult and effortful process, with actions such as putting the clutch in, shifting, and checking the mirror executed as individual actions, each requiring conscious thought. But over time, driving becomes less effortful, and the individual components become integrated into a single routine. Once automatization is complete, consciously thinking about the actions involved in a sub-routine (such as shifting) while doing it can actually interfere with the successful completion of the activity. Models of Sentence Production Sentence production is typically viewed as a multi-stage process (Aitchison, 1989a; Bock, 1995; Carroll, 1994; Dell & O’Seaghdha, 1992). First, the sentence is conceptualized. Then the lemmas corresponding to the content lexical items are accessed. Lemmas are basic, abstract linguistic concepts that can occur in multiple forms, much like a headword in a dictionary entry (Crystal, 1997). For example, the lemma talk, can occur as ‘talk’, ‘talks’, ‘to talk’, ‘talking’ ‘talked’. A lemma contains information about meaning as well as some syntactic information such as category specification. The activated lemmas and any grammatical information directly associated with them (such as functional role in the sentence, also activated by sentence conceptualization) are then passed on to the next stage of production. Here, the lexical items are actually retrieved (what gets retrieved is often called a lexeme), and the sentence is assembled into its (ordered) constituents and grammatical morphemes are inserted. Finally, the phonological information is accessed and articulatory planning commences. Problems can occur at any stage, thereby disrupting processes of production which occur at later points in time. Thus, trouble retrieving a lemma may interfere with the access of its lexeme, other lemmas or lexemes, and can disrupt the assembly of the clause it is to appear in. (This description is highly simplified and necessarily glosses over many debates within the production literature, for instance, whether the stages are interactive or instead are completely modular. For a comprehensive overview, see Bock, 1995. Importantly, our hypothesis is not affected in any substantial way by these issues.)

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Experimental Studies of the Relationship between Memory and Language There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating a strong relationship between language on the one hand, and features of human memory on the other. Just and Carpenter (1992) describe numerous studies demonstrating a correlation between individual differences in working memory capacity and differences in individuals’ abilities to parse and comprehend complex sentence structures. This relationship has also been demonstrated in children. Adams and Gathercole (2000), for instance, found a significant positive correlation between individual short-term memory abilities and language production performance in four-year old children. Children with better memory skills produced longer sentences and used more GFS than those with poorer memory skills. King and Just (1991) demonstrated that this relationship is not simply one of individual speakers having superior skills in both areas (working memory and sentence comprehension). They found that sentence comprehension was impaired when adult participants performed a simultaneous task that required working memory resources. Leonard et al. (2000) found a similar relationship in children. They conducted a study with normally developing and Specific Language Impaired children who were not yet consistently producing is and -ed. They hypothesized that if working memory limitations were causing at least some of the difficulty the children were having with these functors, removing some of the cognitive demands imposed by sentence production should result in increased production. They accomplished this by priming syntactic structures containing the grammatical features of interest. They then compared the rates of production of is and -ed in productions following primed sentences versus those not following relevant primes, and found increased production for both groups of children following relevant primes. The reduction in cognitive load provided by the priming allowed for the greater production of grammatical morphemes. Similar relationships between cognitive load and the production of GFS have also been demonstrated in adult L2 learners. Gass et al. (1999) examined the effects of task repetition on the grammatical complexity of linguistic output in L2 Spanish speakers. They hypothesized that task repetition would lessen the overall cognitive load demanded by the task, making more resources available for production itself, and that this in turn, would allow for an improvement in linguistic performance. They asked college Spanish

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students to describe (in Spanish) a short video, and found that students who described the same video multiple times showed the greatest increase in the use of GFS. These students improved each time they described the video, and improved more than students who described different videos each time. These results support the idea that when memory constraints are lessened production can improve. The Lexical Competence Hypothesis We propose that this same relationship is involved in the structural expansion characteristic of creolization. In the course of planning and producing an utterance speakers must access the content words, plan the sentence structures, find and insert grammatical morphemes, and finally, insert the phonological specifications (Aitchison, 1989a; Bock, 1995; Carroll, 1994). Each of these sub-parts of the production process requires cognitive resources. If one (or more) aspect of this process is particularly demanding, it will use up greater resources than it otherwise would require, thereby leaving fewer resources available for other aspects of production. A reduction in the resources available to these other aspects of production has the potential to interfere with their successful completion. When planning an utterance the most critical portions of the message are the meaning-bearing content lexical items. Accessing the lexical content items is thus the primary step in sentence production (Bock, 1995; Bock & Levelt, 1994). Following the reasoning above, when this access process is difficult it uses up more cognitive resources which can result in later aspects of utterance planning (such as accessing purely functional or grammatical forms, or planning long complex sentences) being compromised. This ultimately results in the production of simpler sentences that may be lacking some or all of the expected GFS.5

5 This prediction may seem contrary to what would be expected given the production literature. We are saying that function morphemes are more vulnerable than are content morphemes, when in fact, they are far less likely to be involved in slips-of-the-tongue and other kinds of speech errors. The error data is not, however, incompatible with our proposal, since vulnerability to deletion and vulnerability to error are logically separate, and indeed, are quite separate in the case of first language acquisition. It has long been noted that children learning English start out by producing content words almost to the complete exclusion of grammatical morphology, and that they do not make mistakes with grammatical forms when they do

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Lexical access in an L1, at least for common vocabulary, is typically an automatic process; we do not consciously search for words as we construct sentences. This is not the case in L2 speech, especially in the beginning stages. As anyone who has learned a foreign language can attest, vocabulary acquisition is not easy. Recalling an appropriate word can often be difficult, especially when one is attempting to use it in a sentence (rather than simply recalling it for a word translation task). Because early in L2 acquisition lexical access is not an automatic process, it requires a great deal of the limited resources available to working memory. These resources are then less available for other processes of sentence construction, such as the selection of function words and the construction of complex sentence structures. We term a speaker’s facility with content words lexical competence. Lexical competence is reflected in the time and effort spent on lexical access (at both the lemma and lexeme levels) as well as the size of a speaker’s lexicon. That is, not only do people with greater degrees of lexical competence access their words faster, they also know more words overall (cf. Dapretto & Bjork, 2000). Speakers with larger vocabularies are more likely to match a concept with an appropriate word, resulting in an overall reduction in the resources allocated to the search and the time spent searching. Many factors may affect lexical competence, but a primary one is time spent speaking the language. Recall that repetition (or practice) leads to greater automaticity. Thus, the more a speaker uses a language the more automatized lexical access becomes, and this translates into increased lexical competence in the language. A speaker will have lower lexical competence in a new L2 than in her L1. Likewise, she will have greater competence in an oft-used L2 than in one she uses infrequently. Clearly, this has important implications for pidgin and creole genesis. Pidgins are, by definition, restricted languages which are not the primary language of any group of speakers. They are neither native languages, nor are they used in all situations and contexts. Speakers do not use them on a daily basis to conduct all of their daily activities. If limited use results in limited lexical competence, and limited lexical competence results in low rates of GFS and CSS, then this social situation should lead to little overt expression of GFS and minimal production of com-

emerge. That is, grammatical morphemes emerge later than content words and may at first be used probabilistically, but are not used incorrectly (Brown, 1973).

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plex sentences. This is exactly what we see in pidgins like Chinook Jargon and Russenorsk, for instance (Sebba, 1997; Thomason & Kaufman, 1988). Just as low lexical competence is expected in situations of intermittent language use, increases in lexical competence are expected in situations of more frequent use of a language. When a language becomes a vernacular, it is used more frequently by speakers. This increased usage due to vernacularization leads to increased lexical competence, and we propose that this increased competence leads to an increase in the production of GFS and CSS. Our model, then, predicts exactly the outcomes seen in the development of Tok Pisin (Sankoff, 1994) and Haitian Creole (Lefebvre, 1998). Another route to lexical competence is nativization, since a native speaker is by definition a fluent speaker. In nativization the reduction in processing load that allows for the emergence of increased GFS actually occurs across generations: the generation of new native speakers do not experience the same cognitive interference that their parents did. This same decrease in processing load at early points in the production process allows speakers to plan and implement longer, more complicated sentences in all three cases. In other words, lexical competence is the mechanism that mediates between vernacularization and the increased expression of GFS and CSSs. Vernacularization itself is the why, and increased lexical competence is the how. This raises the question of what constitutes frequent (or infrequent) usage. How often does a language need to be used before it will evince GFS and CSSs? At what point does one say that the language has vernacularized enough to show signs of expansion? Our response is that there is unlikely to be a solid line dividing languages with and without GFS and CSS. Given this, one would not only expect to see differences between early pidgins and abrupt creoles, but would also expect some differences within the category of pidgins. So, for instance, very little GFS would be expected in a pidgin like Russenorsk, but a little might be expected in early Melanesian pidgin (given the descriptions of its use given by Keesing, 1988). However, the differences between early pidgins and abrupt creoles would be expected to be greater than the differences between various not yet completely vernacularized pidgins. Ultimately, of course, the existence of a threshold is an empirical question. Evidence does suggest that expansion of a language to a written mode allows for (or possibly drives) the creation of greater stylis-

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tic variation (Mühlhäusler, 1986), which is suggestive of a threshold effect. However, this is a mode or functional threshold, not a frequency threshold.6 The hypothesis as we have described it thus far does predict that expansion will always occur with increased competence. But as one reviewer pointed out, there are pidgins that are or were used regularly and thus whose speakers would be expected to have high lexical competence, but which do not evince much GFS and CSS. We expect that such instances are cases where the pidgin, although used regularly, is not used for intra-group communication, but rather, for communication between groups who are unequal in status and power. This leads to a situation where the lower-status group will not want to speak the language; it is distasteful to them. They use as little of it as possible and suppress any extra-communicative devices, such as GFS, in an almost conscious fashion; they intend to speak a simplified language signaling their negative attitude toward the other group. (This is different from the desire, or lack therefore, to learn the language; we are speaking here of lacking the desire to use the language because of what it represents). We would predict, however, that if the use of the language were to change such that it became the vernacular of the lower-status group, this suppression of extra-communicative devices would cease, and expansion would quickly occur. While our specific hypothesis is a cognitive one, cases such as these point to the need to include other kinds of factors, such as social situations, in a complete model of expansion. This is not at all at odds with our position. The Lexical Competence Hypothesis is not intended to be a complete model of expansion, and certainly is not intended to replace the vernacularization hypothesis. It is an explanation of why and how vernacularization leads to expansion, and as such it is a complementary addition to the vernacularization hypothesis.

6 This issue is made more complicated by the fact that we are linking lexical competence, which is at the level of individual speakers and thus, is subject to individual variation, with characteristics of languages, existing at a level of the community. However, like any other basic cognitive ability, individual differences in the memory abilities that underlay lexical competence should be distributed in the same way across all populations. Thus, the effect of individual differences is the same in any community of (non-cognitively impaired) humans.

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Expansion in Three Kinds of Creoles Abrupt Creoles and Expanded Pidgins In the early stages of pidgin formation, if access to the superstrate language is limited, speakers will be unable to learn much of it beyond lexical content items and simple sentence structures. According to our model these early speakers will use increasing CSS and GFS as their facility with the vocabulary increases, which happens as they use the language more and more often, as will happen alongside vernacularization. But where does this structure come from? Although our proposal does not directly address the question of which particular structures are likely to show up in a creole (i.e. which tense/aspect contrasts), nor where they come from (substrate, superstrate, or universals), it does have implications for these questions, as we describe here.7 We are assuming that when pidgin speakers go about forming a sentence, they also conceptualize some information that is of a grammatical nature, what Slobin (1993) refers to as “categories of thinking for speaking” (p. 244). Two different kinds of these grammatical categories will be included in the sentences’ conceptualization. First, speakers will conceptualize the grammatical information their native language encodes such as tense/aspect distinctions, definiteness. These categories are different from categories such as verbal agreement, in that they have independently conceptualizable meanings. (These are essentially the early system morphemes of Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2000). While the concepts can be formed by any human, they are not necessarily part of the conceptualization of every human sentence. Instead, 7 At this point it might seem to some readers as if our model really only works when pidgin/creole creators have managed to learn GFS from the superstrate or lexifier, and therefore, that it predicts that the GFS that emerges in the new language will be from the lexifier. If this were the case, then creoles should look very much like their lexifiers, so much, in fact, that we probably wouldn’t want to call them a different languages at all, but rather L2 varieties of the lexifiers. And yet, we are claiming that our model makes predictions about pidgin/creole genesis. Here, it is important to make explicit the distinction between mechanism and outcome. The same mechanism that in L2 acquisition may produce a variety quite like the TL can, in different circumstances, result in the emergence of a pidgin or creole language. For instance, the degree of access to the TL is likely important to the outcome. (Although work on untutored adult L2 acquisition suggests that even with high access many adults will fail to acquire much of the TL GFS, Clements, 2001a, 200b; Perdue, 1993). What differs in these two outcomes (pidgin or creole genesis and L2 acquisition) is the context. The mechanism, we argue, is the same.

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they are language specific with different languages encoding different distinction. Different speakers, therefore, will conceptualize different contrasts when planning an utterance. Why would speakers conceptualize the grammatical information from their L1s? They cannot help it; it is an automatic part of the process of sentence production. This information is just part of what they include in a sentence. Second, they will also conceptualize the categories of the target language (TL) that they have learned. It is not necessary that they be correct analyses of TL categories, just that the categories have their source in TL patterns. Even when TL categories have been acquired, however, their inclusion may be probabilistic (unpredictable), not obligatory. (This probabilistic use of grammatical categories is typical of second language speech, Adamson, 1988). Here, we should point out a distinction between TL and second language (L2) that has so far been implicit in our discussion. Target language refers to the language being learned. This label is independent of how much or how little of the language a learner wants to acquire; even if all she wants is to learn enough words to communicate in a rudimentary way, the language is her target language. L2, as we are using it in this discussion, is the grammar constructed by the learner. L2 grammars can contain elements of L1 grammars, TL grammars, and linguistic universals. While a TL grammar is common to its native speakers, an L2 grammar is specific to an individual; different learners exposed to the same TL can construct different L2s. The terms interlanguage and learner variety, common in the adult L2 literature, refer to the same concept. We are avoiding these terms because they emphasize the relationship between the TL and the learner’s grammar. Interlanguage implies that it is an incomplete, possibly unsystematic, version of the TL, that will, over time, become more like the TL grammar. Learner variety again implies that it is a not-quite-perfect rendition of the TL grammar; they are seen as varieties of the TL, albeit incorrect ones. For researchers interested in how L2 acquisition unfolds, these terms, and their implications, are appropriate. However, our focus is different. We want to emphasize the difference between the target language and the grammar constructed by the learner; the learner’s grammar may be very different from the TL; yet, they are often highly systematic, but in a different way than the TL (Perdue, 1993). This difference between a TL grammar and the grammar constructed by a learner is especially salient in the context of discussions of pidgin and creole genesis,

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where a new language barely resembling the TL emerges within a community of L2 speakers. This new language can itself become a TL. So far, we have only been describing the conceptualization of the sentence, not lemma access and retrieval, or the actual construction of the sentence. This next section briefly describes these subsequent parts of the production process, and how we envision them unfolding to produce the kind of functional expansion seen in creolization. As described above, content lemmas are activated, and they and their relevant syntactic information are passed on for assembly. The sentence frame is constructed using the specifications of the L2. The grammatical information that was part of the conceptualization may also be incorporated into the sentence frame, but only under certain conditions. Although they are conceptualized, grammatical categories from the L1 do not typically make it into the sentence. When the production system tries to access the lexeme that corresponds to the L1 grammatical concept, it runs into trouble because none exists in the L2. Further, studies of bilinguals suggest that they actively filter out or suppress their L1 when speaking an L2, and this effect is stronger in speakers who are less proficient in the L2 (Meuter, 2001; Meuter & Shallice, 2001). Therefore, the system not only fails to find an L2 lexeme, it is blocked from accessing the L1 lexeme, leaving none to be incorporated into the sentence frame. When phonological specification occurs, more cognitive effort is again focussed on the content lexemes, and the search for the “missing” grammatical lexemes falls by the wayside. Grammatical concepts from the TL will (sometimes) be incorporated into the sentence frame being constructed and may also be spelled-out at this time. Both incorporation and spell-out of TL grammatical concepts will be more likely when they are well known and therefore, more easily accessed. This describes how the production system functions early on. At this time, productions are simple sentences with little or no GFS. The L2 can stabilize in this early state. The L2 system can exist in this state for as long as the speaker continues to use the language, but for expansion to occur something must change. One possible source of change is the more frequent inclusion of TL grammatical morphemes due to increasing lexical competence. As the speaker gains greater competence, resources will be less tied-up in early production processes, allowing for the increased overt expression (or phonological spell-out) of the forms. There is also the possibility that the learner can acquire more TL categories, another way the increasing GFS could have its source in the TL. However, it is likely that access to the TL in most cases

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of pidgin/creole formation is quite restricted, making it hard for learners to acquire the TL categories. Moreover, studies of naturalistic L2 acquisition show that learner varieties often fossilize prior to the acquisition of many TL categories even when TL access is not so restricted (Clements, 2001a, 2001b; Perdue, 1993). It seems, therefore, that learners in a pidgin/creole creation situation will not usually acquire much in the way of target language GFS, making the TL an unlikely source of grammatical morphemes. As previously mentioned, it is also unlikely that actual phonological forms from the substrates will enter the new language due to the operation of an L1 filtering effect.8 So if the GFS doesn’t come from the TL, and cannot come from the substrates, where does it come from? As lexical competence increases resources will be less tied up in access and retrieval of content items. Eventually enough resources will be left at the time of sentence construction that the production system will try to find lexemes which correspond to the L1 grammatical concepts. But because of the block on L1 forms and the lack of an independent L2 form, no lexeme will be retrieved. The system then searches out other options. The most likely candidates are forms in the L2 which are both close in meaning and phonological form to the L1 form. They will be activated at both the lemma and lexeme levels, giving them more activation and thus, higher probability of being selected by the production system. L2 forms that are close in meaning but not phonological form can also be selected, but only when no closer competitor exists. But where to put the new form in the sentence? There are three options. One, place the lexeme where it would go if it were being used in its usual sense. This can be problematic, since often words in pidgins are multi-functional and can thus appear in several different locations in the sentence (Sebba, 1997). Of course, one usage of the word will likely be closer in meaning to the new functional usage than others, so it would be more likely to be placed in that usage’s location. Two, place it where the 8 There is the counter-example of Berbice Dutch, which contains grammatical morphemes from Eastern Ijo (Arends, Kowenberg, & Smith, 1995). It is possible that in Berbice Dutch some group of Eastern Ijo speakers consciously used their native morphemes, and they just happened to be well enough understood that their patterns were accepted and spread throughout the language as a whole. Or, it may be the case that the unusually high number of content items from Eastern Ijo in Berbice Dutch interfered with the functioning of the L1 filter, allowing the Ijo grammatical morphemes to be phonologically specified. These ideas are purely speculative, however.

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corresponding L1 lexeme would go in a sentence. This solution may also be problematic, since the same location might not actually exist in the L2, or might conflict with other structural properties of the L2. Third, the location can be a compromise between the position of the corresponding lexeme in the L1 and constraints imposed by the syntactic configuration of the new L2. Which location is selected depends on several factors, among them, the independent strength of the item selected to fulfill the grammatical function. If it is already a frequently used word in the language, its own properties are well established and thus, is likely to appear in the same location when functioning as a grammatical form as when functioning as a content word, at least when it is first introduced as a grammatical form. This can change over time (cf. Sankoff & Laberge, 1973 on the location of bai in Tok Pisin). Complex sentence structures are even less likely to be based on the TL than GFS. Speech to non-native speakers is predominated by simple sentences with canonical word orders (Long, 1996), giving learners little opportunity to learn the complex sentences of the TL. Additionally, native speakers’ tendencies to use a simplified register with non-native speakers are stronger when the L2 speaker’s competence in the TL is perceived to be low (Long, 1996), (which would almost undoubtedly have been the case in typical situations of pidgin/creole genesis). With so little opportunity to learn how to form complex sentence in the TL, pidgin and creole creators almost certainly must have failed to acquire them. Therefore, when attempting to express more complex ideas they had to do something else. In this situation, the most likely option is that speakers conceptualize the complex sentence structures as they would in their L1 (Boretzky, 1993; Sankoff, 1994; Sharwood-Smith, 1986). The actual surface forms (or sentence frames) will be a compromise between the L2 and the L1 (Klein & Perdue, 1993). There is little need to use an embedded clause when bartering or trading, but there is once speakers start to talk about their lives in more detail. Vernacularization is defined, in part, by an expansion of language use to include just these sorts of topics, implying that attempts to use CSS are more likely to occur if the language is serving as a vernacular. According to our hypothesis, then, attempts at CSSs occur when greater lexical competence has been achieved. It may seem as if the relationship between the production of CSS and lexical competence is less strong than that between the production of GFS and lexical competence, that it is a spurious correlation, both things occurring

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with vernacularization, but without the one actually causing to the other. In some sense, this is completely true. Speakers of early pidgins such as Chinook Jargon and Russenorsk have no real need to produce complex sentences and thus, they do not. However, we submit that they would have some difficulty if they tried to produce a highly complicated sentence; it would put a strain on their cognitive resources. Evidence suggests that planning units are phonological clauses (which are smaller than syntactic clauses), so that a complex sentence with two syntactic clauses may actually contain three or more planning units (Aitchison, 1989a). Importantly, sentences are not planned and produced in serial, one unit at a time (Aitchison, 1989a; Carroll, 1994). Instead, the production and planning of various units overlaps, such that the first unit may currently be being spoken, while the second unit is at the stage of phonological spell out, the third at assembly, and the fourth at lexeme retrieval. Problems at any one of these stages, and in any one of the units, can stretch resources beyond their limit, causing the production of the sentence to fail. When lexical access of content items, a very early and crucial part of production, is difficult, producing a complex sentence becomes a very difficult cognitive process. Lexical competence does not drive the emergence of CSS, as it does with GFS. Instead, it enables it. Some readers will notice that we are predicting that individual speakers may use different CSS and GFS. The particular forms they use are influenced by their L1 (substrate) as well as what they have learned from the TL, which can also differ between speakers. In this, the situation we describe appears more like the development of individual idiolects rather than a shared pidgin. We do not see this as problematic, however. According to Mühlhäusler (1986) this is actually what occurs during expansion. He states (p. 204) “Different pidgin speakers introduce competing solutions to certain communicative problems and as a consequence, we find considerable variability. . .” Several things, however, eventually conspire to produce shared pidgin norms. First, the basic grammatical structure of the TL, such as basic word order, will have been learned. This part of the grammar is shared by the pidgin speakers. Second, the L1 influence may be based on a simplified form of the L1 grammar (McWhorter, 1997). There may be universals of simplification such that, at the very least, related languages simplify in similar ways. Since large groups of the speakers involved in the creation of pidgin/creole languages are often speakers of related languages, the idiolects these speakers


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create will often be quite similar. Third, less competent speakers, who have not yet developed GFS and CSS, can learn from more competent speakers who have already begun using GFS and CSS instead of creating their own. Fourth, there may be some linguistic universals that all speakers will use to fill in the holes of the pidgin grammar. Lastly, the variation in idiolects need not persist. Some attempts at using GFS and CSS will not be successful. To be successful it must be understood. In the case of CSS, it is more likely to be understood if it is similar in structure to the CSS the listener’s L1. In the case of GFS, it is more likely to be understood if the conceptual category encoded by the GFS also exists in the listener’s L1. In these ways, expansion at the level of the individual can lead to expansion at the level of the language, with the forms that stabilize being those most shared by the new speech community. The time course of this expansion will vary according to which type of creole is being formed. In the case of an expanded pidgin, the pidgin can exist in a stabilized form unexpanded for a very long time before it vernacularizes and expands. And full expansion need not take place immediately. Just as vernacularization may occur over an extended period of time, expansion can occur in stages, with different features entering the language at different times. In the case of abrupt creoles expansion occurs quickly, before the pidgin has stabilized in an unexpanded form. In contrast to the adults involved in creating the pidgin, adults arriving in the community at points in time after stabilization do have access to the TL, which is now the pidgin/creole, not the lexifier language. (They may believe that they are learning the lexifier, but it is not the language to which they are exposed, and hence, is not the actual TL). Thus, they are able to learn the new language as they would any L2. Initially their speech will likely also exhibit transfer effects. However, for later arriving adults this L1 influence will diminish over time as they gain competence (lexical and otherwise) in their new L2, as is typically the case in L2 situations (Odlin, 1989). Bickerton and Givón (1978) provide data demonstrating the reduced influence of the L1 over time in speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin English (HPE). They examined word order in the HPE of Japanese and Filipino immigrants. Since both groups have native languages with word orders which differ from HPE (Japanese is SOV, the Philippine languages are VSO, HPE is SVO), Bickerton and Givón expected to see some influence from speakers’ L1s. Results showed that, while word orders were often influenced by speakers’



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L1s, speakers used at least some SVO order even from the very earliest stages of L2 acquisition, indicating that speakers had managed to learn something about the pidgin’s syntax. Importantly, the use of SVO order increased as competence in HPE increased (as measured by non-syntactic factors such as pronunciation). When the adults who learned the pidgin/creole as an L2 (as opposed to created it as an L2) start to use more CSS and GFS, it is from the pidgin/creole, and, therefore, it is likely influenced by the L1s of the earlier speakers. In this way, the most substantial substrate influence can be from the earliest speakers, even if they used the forms infrequently and inconsistently. This early substrate influence becomes stronger when language use increases (Sankoff, 1994). This may occur shortly after the emergence of the language, as is the case in abrupt creolization, or this may occur later when different speakers with different L1s are the predominant speakers. Paradoxically, then, the influence of the pidgin creators’ substrate languages can be more evident at later points in time and in the speech of speakers with other substrate languages (Mühlhäusler, 1986; Sankoff, 1994; Sebba, 1997), if these later speakers are the ones who develop the greatest lexical competence. (This of course depends on the GFS and CSS having previously begun to emerge, but not stabilize, in the speech of the earlier speakers). Expansion in Nativized Creoles In the case of vernacularization concurrent with nativization, expansion seems to occur very quickly. However, the question of where the particular structures come from in such cases is less clear, and the current vernacularization hypothesis provides little in the way of an explanation for the origins of the expanded structure in cases of nativization. It is possible that nativized creoles are expressions of innate language template, as suggested by Bickerton (1981, 1984, 1988), but there are several reasons to think that this is not the case, and the Lexical Competence Hypothesis does not rely on innovation by children to explain the grammatical expansion. If children are being exposed to a pidgin, one of three scenarios must apply. First, it is the language used in the home by the parents because it is the only one they (the parents) share. The child might also be exposed to one or more parental native languages in this situation. The second possibility is that the parents share a language other than the pidgin, but the larger community outside the home does not, resulting in a situation where the pidgin is used for intra-


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community interactions. The child is exposed to parental native languages in the home and the pidgin outside the home. The third scenario is a combination of the first two, neither the parents nor the community share a language other than the pidgin, so the child is exposed to the pidgin both inside and outside the home. Again, the child may additionally be exposed to one or both of the parents’ native languages. These scenarios all share the feature that the adults are using the language a great deal. In fact, the language is becoming the vernacular language within the home, within the community, or both, at the same time as children are being born. Furthermore, with vernacularization we expect expansion. Children are being born into a situation where expansion is beginning to occur, obviating the need to call upon their special abilities to create a language to explain expansion. The idea that adults are actually the ones expanding the language in cases of nativized creoles may seem to be somewhat counterintuitive, but there is some reason to believe it is not as strange as it at first appears. There is some suggestion in Zenk (1984) that this is what actually occurred at Grand Ronde where Chinook Jargon creolized. Chinook Jargon was almost immediately adopted as the vernacular language used in many homes and in the community at large. The language became part of the social identity of the Native Americans on the reserve. There is, therefore, reason to suspect that Chinook Jargon was expanding in the speech of the adults at Grand Ronde concurrent with nativization. Thus, it may not have expanded solely due to nativization. Moreover, if children are responsible for innovating the GFS in a nativized creole, one should not expect to find any traces of the creole GFS in the pidgin prior to nativization. However, there is some evidence from Hawaiian suggesting that at least some of the GFS found in Hawaiian Creole English (HCE) existed in the pidgin (HPE). For example, in her investigation into the differences between HPE and HCE, Roberts (1998) found some examples of bin used to indicate past tense, as well as an example of go used to indicate future reference, in the speech of immigrant adults who presumably spoke HPE. (The examples are from Bickerton, 1976, cited in Roberts, 1998; and Roberts, 1998). While instances such as these are the exception (most sentences with past reference in Robert’s and Bickerton’s samples are unmarked) they do suggest that some of the creole GFS was present prior to nativization.



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More importantly perhaps, it turns out that children are not very innovative when it comes to language learning. They do not ignore their input when it contains inconsistencies (apparent or real), but instead, learn from it in a highly constrained way. This lack of innovation is, in fact, one of the principle properties of child learners that makes it possible for them to learn language so well and so quickly (Chomsky, 1959; Newport, 1988, 1990; Pinker, 1984). While it is true that children exposed to natural human languages do produce novel forms considered ungrammatical according to the adult grammar, they do not produce such forms in an ad hoc fashion. For instance, a frequently cited example of a non-input-driven child error is morphological overregularization. However, overregularization errors are indicators of success at learning the rules governing the language (Kuczaj, 1977), not evidence of unconstrained creativity. Children are ignoring the inconsistencies in their input, and creating a rule covering all past tense forms, despite the presence of counter-examples.9 Another kind of error often cited as demonstrating the linguistic innovativeness of children is English-learning children’s use of accusative case marked pronouns in subject position in the early stages of acquisition despite the apparent absence of such constructions from their input. However, children do hear sentences with accusative pronouns as subjects. For instance, in the sentence ”Do you want me to put your shoes on?” the accusative marked pronoun me is the subject of the verb put. Children are also likely to hear sentences such as ”Did you see her waving at you?” in which the accusative pronoun precedes a tensed verb. Of course, to an adult these two sentences differ in important ways from simple, declarative sentences. But this is exactly what a child must learn – how infinitives differ from finite forms and the phonetic forms corresponding to different case marking. No amount of innate knowledge will exempt a child from having to learn these language-specific properties. So to a learner who does not yet know these

9 Despite the fact that much is made of overregularizations, it should be pointed out that such errors are actually quite uncommon. Not all children produce such forms, and those who do typically do not produce overregularizations very frequently (Marcus et al., 1990). Moreover, such errors are not restricted to children, but are also made by adult native speakers under certain conditions (Bybee & Slobin, 1982) and so are not indicative of any special innovativeness possessed by children. These facts, however, do not detract from the importance of overregularization as an indicator of rule acquisition.


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things, forms which in an adult grammar are accusative case marked pronouns can precede verbs, both finite and non-finite, and thus, such forms do occur in the child’s input. (We are not claiming that children make this error because they hear more clauses with accusative pronouns as subjects. We have not examined this aspect of their input, and would guess that this is not the case.10 See Wexler, 1994, for an explanation of such mistakes in terms of children’s knowledge of INFL). Once again, this is not as clear an example of linguistic creativity as it at first seems. There are two situations that stand in apparent contradiction to our claim that children are not very innovative: Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), and home-sign. NSL is the sign language used in Nicaragua and has been studied almost since its inception in the early 1980’s (Kegl & Iwata, 1989). Researchers have had the opportunity to directly compare the language as used by signers who learned the language at different ages (Senghas, 1995), as well as at different stages in its development (Senghas, 1995; Senghas & Coppola, 2001; Senghas, Coppola, Newport, & Supalla, 1997). They have found several differences between the signing of the earliest users and those who learned the language more recently. Importantly, these differences are only apparent when the learners were children; those who learned the language as adults do not evince any grammatical expansion in their signing. The language seems to have changed when the first generation of child learners entered the newly established NSL community, suggesting that they invented the new forms. However, there are two important points to be made with regard to NSL. First, there were children involved in the creation of the language, but these children did not use the language as it is used today. It took another generation of learners, who were also children, to expand the language. Second, many, if not all, of the features discussed in relation to the expansion of NSL occur in the signing of the language’s earliest users, the creators. What distinguishes their NSL from that of the later learners is how often and how consistently they use the “new” features. The later learners seem to have taken unsystematic, inconsistent forms and begun to systematize (i.e. grammaticize) them. Clearly, what the child-learners do is 10 However, Tomasello (2000) points out that children hear a lot of such constructions in sentences directed towards themselves (as opposed to sentences directed towards others) which might make them very salient. See also McCawley (1991), who distinguishes between children’s input and their intake.



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very different than the earliest users, but almost all of what they do can be proposed to have its roots in what the earliest users did. The second scenario that poses a problem for claims that children are not very innovative is home-sign. Home-sign is a system of gesture use that can develop for communication between a deaf child and her family when there is no attempt to use a conventional signed language. Since the child is deaf she does not have access to the spoken language around her, and so the home-sign is her only means to communicate with her family. Researchers have been interested in the linguistic status of home-sign, examining whether or not it is systematic, and if it shares any features with real languages. Early research on young home-signers demonstrated that their gestures are often systematic (Goldin-Meadow & Feldman, 1977), and more recent research suggests that these systems share many features with each other (GoldinMeadow & Mylander, 1984), even across cultures (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1998). For example, Goldin-Meadow and Mylander (1998) found that home-signers in the USA and Taiwan predominantly use ergative-like orders in the multi-gesture productions, suggesting some kind of universal bias. Research on home-sign in older individuals suggests that home-sign can become quite complex, possibly to the point where it includes agreement morphology (Coppola, Senghas, Newport & Supalla, 1997). However, this same research shows that the systems developed by different children living in the same culture are not all the same, suggesting that when home-sign expands different children can expand it in different ways. Importantly, the systems developed by the older home-signers differ from each other in ways in which real signed languages differ, suggesting that the same universal constraints are acting in the development of home-sign systems and real signed languages (Coppola, Senghas, Newport & Supalla, 1997; Newport & Supalla, 2000). The work on home-sign, then, suggests that constrained innovation is possible. But it is not constrained to one option as something like a Bioprogram would suggest. Rather, it looks as if innovation is constrained to a few, possibly parameterized, options. Thus, children might innovate new forms in creole genesis, but they are no more likely to all come up with the same thing than are their parents. One issue remains unresolved. Recalling the earlier discussion of expansion in abrupt creolization, expansion in its early stages leads to variation. Individual speakers may innovate different GFS and CSSs, and this variation disappears during stabilization. But in the scenario of vernacularization con-


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current with nativization outlined above, stabilization has not yet occurred prior to the introduction of the children. But then how and when does stabilization occur? Following Newport (1999) and Siegel (1997), we see this as the role of children in vernacularization with nativization. Prior to stabilization the pidgin contains inconsistencies, so children’s input must be inconsistent in such situations.11 Children, it seems, are especially good at getting rid of inconsistency present in their input (Ross, 2001; Ross & Newport, 1996; Singleton & Newport, in press). Singleton and Newport (in press) describe changes imposed by a child learner on the inconsistent and variable language to which he was exposed. The child, called Simon, learned American Sign Language exclusively from his parents who were non-native signers. Like other adult learners (Adamson, 1988; Johnson, Shenkman, Newport, & Medin, 1996; Meisel, Clahsen & Pienemann, 1981; Newport, 1988, 1990; Prévost & White, 2000; Sorace, 1999, 2000; Wolfram, 1985), Simon’s parents were inconsistent in their use of GFS. Simon, however, did not sign in the same inconsistent manner. Instead, he seemed to impose rules on his input, and in so doing, regularized the language. This ability has also been documented in other children learning from input that was far more pidginlike. Ross (2001) examined children who were learning from parents who were themselves only learning to sign in response to the birth of a deaf child, and so whose signing was very rudimentary and inconsistent. She found that these children preformed the same kind of smoothing out or regularizing that Simon did, even when their input was almost always lacking in GFS. This suggests that there may be differences in the outcomes of creolization with and without nativization. Both result in increased GFS and CSS, but creolization by adults results in languages in which the GFS is still variable and somewhat inconsistent because they are L2s. In contrast, creoles resulting from nativization will have been regularized by the children, and thus, will exhibit less variation. This may happen over a few generations of child learners, with each one regularizing some as yet unknown amount, eventually resulting in a perfectly normal language (which will, of course, contain sociolinguistic variation like every other natural human language), or

11 This inconsistency is, in fact, what Bickerton (1988) claims causes children to access their Bioprogram.



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it may happen more quickly. At present, we do not know enough about this kind of regularization to make specific predictions about its time course. THE PRESENT STUDY Here we describe the results of a short-term language creation experiment conducted to investigate the predictions made by our model. We were interested in how much structure might be present in a very early or incipient pidgin, what this GFS would look like, and the nature of the relationship between an individual’s lexical competence and the amount of GFS and CSS present in her speech. The present study was based on a similar experiment conducted by Master, Schumann and Sokolik (1989), examining the structural properties of pidgin languages. When they examined the data from their laboratory pidgin, they found that participants did not create any inflections or bound morphology of any kind. Instead, participants relied on whole lexical items, e.g. using adverbs for temporal reference. While it is undoubtedly true that participants did not create a totally regular, rule-governed language, it is possible that the beginnings of GFS were actually present in the laboratory pidgin. Their results also generally confirm the notion that pidgins lack complex sentence structure. However, they do give one example sentence from their experimentally created pidgin that contains a relative clause, indicating that the pidgin did not completely lack CSS. There are a few features of the study by Master et al. that make it difficult to make any strong conclusions about the structural properties of pidgins on the basis of their data. First, as the authors themselves point out, the participants in the study were not linguistically na¨ıve. They were graduate students in applied linguistics and were, therefore, sensitive to the structural properties of natural languages. Second, data are given in the form of examples, rather than quantitatively, so that the reader has no idea how frequent or infrequent a particular form is. (We should point out that the primary focus of their paper was lexicalization, not grammaticalization, which no doubt contributed to the style of data presentation.) Although heavily based on Master et al., the methods used in the current study were designed to explore our model of structural expansion in pidgin/creole genesis while remedying some of the difficulties with the original study.


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Method Participants Two native English-speaking females who were undergraduate students at the University of Rochester participated in the study. They were aged 18 and 19. They were recruited via advertisements posted around the campus and were paid for their participation in the study. Participants were told that we were interested in how people learn to talk, and that they would be taught many words in a new language and then play games using their new language. Both women reported that their native language was English, and that English was the only language used in the home. Coincidentally, both had studied French in high school and both had taken one year of college French, although neither participant described herself as fluent in French. Neither participant reported any background of native language deficiencies or other learning problems. Neither had ever taken any linguistics classes or served as a research assistant for psycholinguistic research. Finally, neither participant had any prior familiarity with Farsi, the language that provided the lexicon for the study. Lexicon The lexicon used in the present study consisted of 233 words from Farsi (Modern Persian). The Farsi words used in the experiment are listed alphabetically by their gloss in Appendix A. Words designated as function words are listed separately from content words. The function words are further designated as words which were designated a priori as function words (unmarked), and those which emerged as having a functional usage in the speech of our participants (marked with a star). The particulars of this distinction are explained below in reference to the vocabulary test scores. Procedure and Materials Participants reported to the lab for two 90-minute sessions each week for a period of 10 weeks, for a total of 30 hours. They began the first three sessions by listening to an audiotape of a woman (the second author) pronouncing each of the Farsi words followed by its English gloss. (Pronunciation was somewhat Anglicized as the focus of the study was not on phonological



31

development or other related processes.) The audiotape, which lasted about 20 minutes, was presented two times. After this, the experimenter (the second author – IME) presented participants with flashcards containing either a picture or an English word on one side of the card and the relevant Farsi word on the other. The majority of the words represented highly concrete meanings, and so were easily depicted. Typed English words were used for meanings not easily depicted, e.g. ‘for’ and ‘and’. Participants were shown the picture or English word and asked to provide the Farsi word. If they could not, the card was turned over by the experimenter, and participants were allowed to read the typed Farsi word. Participants used the flashcards throughout the first five weeks of the study. By the fourth session (at the end of the second week) participants had established a tentative grasp of a number of the Farsi lexical items and so began participating in a variety of interactive tasks which drew on their vocabulary. The tasks are described in detail below. For all sessions (with the exception of the time of testing) they had free access to a list of all the Farsi words along with their one-word English glosses. Interactive Language Tasks The experimenter was present during all sessions and helped to introduce and supervise the activities. The participants were not provided with any feedback or input regarding their productions. The only restriction placed on their (linguistic) behavior was that they conduct all games and activities using their Farsi lexicon only. All language activities were videotaped. Picture finding. Participants played a revised version of the children’s game “I spy” using Richard Scarry’s picture book (1979) What do people do all day?. While looking at a given page depicting a wide variety of characters and actions, one participant acted as the informant, the other as the guesser. The informant was asked to describe a particular object or actor in the picture to the guesser. The guesser then attempted to determine the identity of the object or actor based on the description provided by the informant. The informant was permitted to provide multiple descriptions and the guesser was encouraged to ask clarifying questions. This task proved to be very challenging due to the detail and complexity of the pictures. As with all interactive language tasks, participants took turns being informant and guesser.


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Route descriptions. Participants examined a large posterboard drawing of a small town. One participant, the informant, was given two locations, an origin and a goal. She then had to describe the origin location along with a route to the goal. On the basis of this information the guesser attempted to determine the goal location. Story-telling. Participants read a short story (in English) from a set that included culturally familiar fairy tales such as Snow White, along with some less familiar Russian and Swedish folk tales. Participants were asked to recount the story in as much detail as possible. The participant listening to the story was encouraged to ask questions and make comments. Video-retelling. Participants watched short animated films (approximately 3 minutes in length) and then retold the story to the other participant, who had not seen the video. Again, the participant who was listening was free to interrupt with questions and comments. Small talk. Participants randomly selected questions from a set of questions typed (in English) on index cards. The cards included questions about summer plans, part-time employment, career choices, and college courses and majors. One participant then asked the other the question she had selected. Participants took turns selecting and answering questions. Tests Vocabulary tests. Participants’ vocabulary was tested at weeks 5 and 10, with testing conducted individually. In both testing sessions, the experimenter presented the English gloss for each of the words (one at a time) and the participant provided the Farsi equivalent, if possible. Testing was untimed, and responses were recorded by the experimenter. Other tests. In addition to the vocabulary testing, subjects were also asked to respond individually to a variety of structured stimuli. These stimuli were drawn from American Sign Language tests of fluency designed by Supalla et al. (in press). They comprised videotaped vignettes and still pictures of brief events designed to elicit particular responses and so control the range of possible answers. Participants were asked to describe the scenes as clearly as possible.



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Analyses Transcription. All videotapes were transcribed initially by the experimenter (IME). Speech was transcribed according to standard guidelines (Brown, 1973). As recommended by Demuth (1996), portions of the data analyzed in this study were also transcribed for reliability by another coder who had not been present at any of the experimental sessions (the first author, CLH). Twenty-eight percent of the utterances analyzed in the current paper were transcribed by both authors. Interrater reliability was computed for words, as well as for the placement of sentence boundaries. Interrater reliability for individual words was 99.3%, and for utterance boundaries was 88.7%. The transcriptions of the second author were followed when disagreements occurred. Structural Analysis. Productions were evaluated for a) production of functional structures, b) consistency in the presence/absence of particular functional structures, c) consistent use of specific words to encode those structures, and d) syntactic patterns. Self-repetitions were included in the analyses. However, repetitions that were in response to a request for repetition were excluded from analyses, as were answers to questions, as these were often sentence fragments. The particular structures that were examined are described in greater detail below. Results Vocabulary Participants’ scores on the vocabulary tests conducted at weeks 5 and 10 are shown in Table 1. While both participants’ total scores improved over time, participant MN improved only slightly, as she was already performing close to ceiling at the time of the first test.12 LC, in contrast, improved from 49% to 71% correct over the same time period. Despite the improvement, LC never reached the level of proficiency demonstrated by MN. We also measured participants’ knowledge of function words (FWs) only. The first score listed in Table 1 for FWs is for those words designated a priori as FWs. These included adpositions, conjunctions, verbs that are 12

Not participant’s actual initials.


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Table 1. Vocabulary test – percent correct (total, function words only) Time of testing Participant

Week 5

Week 10

Total Function Words

88 100 (96)

95 97 (98)

Total Function Words

49 78 (67)

71 97 (92)

MN

LC

Note. Values in parentheses represent participants’ performance for both function words designated as such a priori and those which emerged as function words during the course of the experiment.

modals in Standard English, yes, no, pronouns, wh-words, and numerals. (Numerals were designated as function words because they were the most obvious choice for plural indicators.) For these FWs, MN performed at ceiling at both times of testing. LC, in contrast, showed improvement over time, and by the time of the second test, she was also performing at ceiling. The second FW score (in parentheses) is for the a priori FWs as well as the words that emerged as FWs in the experimental pidgin, such as ‘all’ and ‘more’, and verbs that take sentential complements in Standard English (whether or not they were used in this way by participants during the experiment). (See Appendix A for a complete listing of FWs.) We computed this second score because we wanted to investigate whether any differences in the actual use of GFS and CSSs were simply due to differences in participants’ knowledge of the relevant words (since if you do not know the word you cannot use it). Given this, we needed a measure that included all words actually used as function words, as well as all words that allowed for the expression of more complex sentences (e.g. verbs taking sentential complements). The pattern that emerges for this larger category of FWs is the same as that for the a priori FWs. MN performed at ceiling on both tests. LC improved over time, and by week 10 was also performing close to ceiling. To summarize, at week 5 participants differed both in their overall vocabulary scores and their FW scores. By week 10, however, the only difference between participants was the overall measure of vocabulary knowledge, meaning that they only differed in their knowledge of content lexical items.



35

Structural Analyses Participants’ speech was analyzed for the presence of GFS, as well as for the consistency of encoding of that structure. Analysis was guided by these questions: did they ever mark a particular grammatical distinction? if so, how often? and finally, were they consistent in how they marked it? Five GFS features were selected for analysis for the present study: subject marking, plural marking, existential sentences, copular forms, and temporal marking. These features were investigated for particular reasons. We examined the explicit production of subjects because it is frequently said that, unlike in natural human languages including creoles, in incipient or early pidgin speech subjects are often unpredictably omitted (Bickerton, 1981, 1984; see also Mühlhäusler, 1986, p. 158, for examples from Pacific Jargon English). (Omitted subjects may, of course, occur in human languages. But languages that allow them have other correlated features that pidgins do not have, such as rich agreement.) Although plural marking is not typically considered a feature which distinguishes pidgins from creoles (see, for instance, Romaine, 1988, Chapter 2), it is one which is typically absent from early pidgins, and which often emerges in expanded pidgins and nativized creoles. (Although some pidgins do have plural marking, and not all creoles mark it categorically, Mühlhäusler, 1986.) This is possibly due to the fact that most languages which have served as lexifiers, both European and non-European, indicate plurality using affixes. Since affixes are usually lost in pidgin formation, the pidgin emerges with no plural morpheme inherited from the lexifier. When plural markers do emerge in creoles, they are often based on quantifiers (e.g. adverbials) or numerals (Mühlhäusler, 1986), although forms homophonous with plural pronouns are also common (Holm, 1988). We analyzed the existential and copular sentences separately because of the fact that many creoles languages exhibit a difference between the forms of existential and copular sentences (Bickerton, 1981, 1984; Holm, 1988; McWhorter, 1997).13 We included temporal marking in our analyses because it is another feature that 13 This is actually a gross simplification of the actual patterns found in many creoles. Often, the copula is further subdivided (Holm, 1988; McWhorter, 1997). While it would potentially have been interesting to conduct an analysis by subdivisions on our data, the low number of each of the different constructions made any meaningful analysis by subcategories impossible. For example, (using the copular sub-types in Clark, 1970) there was only one locative-type copular construction in our data. It did contain the verb bashad ‘it-is-so’. But we would not


36


distinguishes most early pidgins from creoles: pidgins lack consistent temporal marking whereas creoles develop it (Bickerton, 1981, 1984; Mühlhäusler, 1986; Romaine, 1988; Sebba, 1997). We selected the productions from the story-telling and video-retelling task for use in most of the analyses for several reasons. First, participants completed these tasks at two different times, providing a means of measuring improvement over time. Second, the two activities were conducted fairly close in time to the two vocabulary tests. Activity Time 1 occurred in week 7, two weeks following the first vocabulary test at week 5. Activity Time 2 occurred during week 10, the same week as the second vocabulary test. Third, story-telling and video-retelling allowed for relatively wide-open discussion topics compared to the route-description and picture-finding tasks. Fourth, unlike the Supalla et al. (in press) ASL tasks, the story and video tasks are narrative tasks, allowing for greater potential use of temporal markers. Finally, and most importantly, we knew what participants were trying to say because we knew the stories (unlike the small talk task). This feature is particularly important for examining the use of things such as plurals. We also examined participants’ productions for CSSs and word orders used. The same data was used to examine CSS, but the structural analysis examining word orders produced by participants was carried out on the data resulting from the American Sign Language test battery tasks. This was due to the large number of sentences produced in these tasks, which provided a larger speech sample than any other task (or set of similar tasks). Also, unlike the video- and story-telling tasks, both participants described the same events and so any differences between the complexity of their syntactic structures must be attributed to causes internal to the participants. The ASL tasks were administered during week 10, the same week as the second vocabulary test. Production of GFS The GFS production data from both participants at Times 1 and 2 are presented in Table 2. The data for subjects, plurals, existentials, and copulas are in percent usage in expected contexts. Usage in expected context was defined differently for individual categories. For plurals, it is the percentage of semantically plural nouns marked as plural. For existentials and copulas want to conclude from that lone example that the speaker uses bashad in 100% of the locative copular constructions: there is simply not enough data.



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Table 2. Production of Grammatical Structures by Time of Testing Participant LC

MN

Structure

Time 1

Time 2

Time 1

Time 2

Subject Existential Plural Copula Temporal

96 100 50 47 18

97 100 66.7

99.1 100 66 (90) 90.5 30.2

98 100 100 87.5 34.2

33.3

Note. Data for Subject, Plural, Existential, and Copula are percentage use in expected contexts. Data for Temporal are percent of total sentences containing temporal marking.

it is the percentage of existential and copular constructions, respectively, that contain the word bashad, which was commonly used as a verb in these two types of constructions by the participants. (This is discussed in more detail below). Temporal usage is reported in terms of the percentage of sentences containing a temporal marker since it was not possible to determine the contexts requiring temporal marking. The data show that both participants consistently produce subjects, and bashad in existentials, at both times of testing. MN produces a plural marker 66–90% of the time already by Time 1, and 100% of the time by Time 2. (The two figures for plural use by MN at Time 1 are due to two instances of a noun, unmarked for plural, which may, or may not, have been semantically plural. It was unclear from the context whether or not the intended referent itself was plural. We therefore report the percentages of plural marking for both interpretations).14 LC produced fewer plural markers than MN, but her production did increase over time. Although neither participant always produced bashad in copular constructions, LC produced it less often than did MN (at least at Time 1), who produced bashad almost 90% of the time. Unfortunately, LC did not produce any copular constructions at Time 2, so we cannot compare her productions at the two times. Temporal markers included anything that indicated a shift in time between utterances or between clauses

14 She used sukhun ‘word’ to refer to a statement, for example, in the sentence chiz tekrar kardan sukhun ‘thing repeat word’. It is unclear whether sukhun refers to the actual words, in which case it should be a plural, or whether it means ‘statement’ in which case it is a singular noun.


38


in the same utterance, such as temporal relative clauses and adverbs. (This category did not include verbs used to indicate temporality, such as go is used in English to mark future. These instances were analyzed separately, and are reported in the analysis of syntactic complexity that follows.) MN produced more temporal markers at Time 1 than LC and did not change much over time. By Time 2, LC produced as many temporal markers as MN. Examples of these five features as they occurred in participants’ productions appear in sentences 1–3 below. Note that in the word-by-word glosses we present the glosses as they were given to participants during word learning and on their word lists. Sometimes these glosses do not appear to be the best translations for the words as they were used by our participants. The sentence-level glosses provide a clearer indication of how the participants were actually using the Farsi lexical items. Sentence 1, produced by MN at Time 1, is a copular construction. Sentence 2 (LC, Time 2) contains a temporal marker, hala ‘now’. Sentence 3 (MN, Time 1) is an existential construction with bashad and contains an indicator of plurality, in this case the numeral do ‘two’. (For interested readers, two longer speech passages appear in Appendix B.) (1) Mard xastan bashad bad man want it-is-so bad ‘the man want-s/ed to be bad’ (2) Hala mard jastan u harakat kardan tan, likin mard zadan Now man jump and move body, but man hit zamin earth/dirt ‘the man jump-s/ed and move-s/d his body, but he falls/fell to the ground’ (3) Anja bashad do bache zan there it-is-so two child woman ‘there are/were two girls’ All three sentences contain subjects, even sentence 3 in which anja ‘there’ occurs in subject position. Participants appear to be using anja as a pleonastic pronominal form. This is particularly interesting given that the form they use as the existential (and copular) verb was glossed for them as containing the word ‘it’, itself a pronoun, which would seem to make the use of a pleonastic



39

redundant, if not illicit. Two things seem to be conspiring here to induce the participants to use anja in the existential constructions. First, its use in copular constructions with overt subjects, as in sentence 1, indicates that they are ignoring the ‘it’ contained within bashad. If they are not ignoring it, then we must conclude that they are producing sentences with two subjects, which is not possible. Thus, we concluded that they must be using bashad simply as ‘be’.15 Second, their grammars mandate that sentences must contain subjects. Since there is no logical subject in an existential, they insert anja ‘there’ to fill the subject position in the sentence. (Their choice of anja to fill this role is likely influenced by the lexical properties of there in English: they transferred the grammatical properties of there into the new pidgin they were creating, and so used its equivalent anja as the pleonastic pronoun. This kind of transfer is not uncommon in adult L2 acquisition, Odlin, 1989). In sum, despite differences in their lexical abilities, both MN and LC consistently produced subjects and an existential verb from the first time of testing. Both also produced plurals, copular verbs, and temporal markers. Although MN produced more of these than LC, LC became more consistent over time. Consistency of Lexical Item Used to Encode GFSs In addition to assessing how consistently participants marked these GFSs, we also examined how consistent they were in their choice of lexical items used to encode a given structure. Of the five facets of GFS we examined, only three – subjects, plurals, and temporal markers – showed variation along this parameter. (As mentioned above, copulas and existential ‘be’ were both encoded by bashad ‘it-is-so’). Subjects, of course, varied 15 This of course begs the question of why they use bashad at all in the copular sentences, instead of adopting a ‘verbless’ copula strategy, which does occur in creole languages (DeGraff, 2000; Phillips, 1982). (By verbless we mean simply that there is no overt copular verb form. It is, of course, possible that the adjectivals and nominals appearing in copular constructions in some creoles are actually verbs, not adjectives or nouns, so that the copular constructions do have verbs, Holm, 1988). We think it is likely the case that the participants produce as many copular verb forms as they do because both English and French (the possible substrates) have similar forms. Thus, in their experience languages always have a copular verb in a copular construction. However, that such verbs are not obligatory in their grammars is indicated by the fact that LC was quite willing to leave them out of sentences, and MN did so as well, although less often.


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according to the referent. When there was no actual subject referent, both participants used anja ‘there’ as a pleonastic pronoun, as shown in Sentence 3. Plural marking varied among four forms: numerals, hame ‘all’, xadr ‘quantity’, and bishtar ‘more’. When a specific quantity was known, participants often used numerals to encode plurality. We believe participants were using numerals to indicate plurality and not simply as indicators of specific numerical quantities because they often continued to use the numeral when it was no longer necessary. In English, if you say two children, for instance, you do not have to repeat the numeral in subsequent mentions. Instead you can just say children. Participants did not do this, however, but instead continued to say ‘two child’. As a general plural marker (i.e. when no specific numeral was known) LC initially used xadr ‘quantity’. Later in the same narrative she switched to hame ‘all’, which she used twice as many times. There was no apparent difference in meaning between the two forms, and both were used in the same session. MN used bishtar ‘more’ as a general plural marker. Interestingly, the participant with the higher level of lexical competence (as measured by vocabulary size) was the one who did not vary in her choice of general plural marker. Participants used three different temporal markers: hala ‘now’, the phrase vaxt moxtalef ‘time different’, and temporal relative clauses. Hala was coded as a temporal marker because it functioned as a discourse level temporal marker. Hala was used to indicate that the events described in adjacent sentences were not simultaneous. The events described could be causally related, related temporally (A must precede B but does not cause B), or they could be unrelated. (Interestingly, Grand Ronde Chinook Jargon seems to have had a similar form also glossed by English now, Zenk, 1984). An example of its use is shown in Example (4). (4) Mard gozashtan tekke ruje tan, u bola raftan tude. Hala Man put piece on body, and climb pile. Now mard jastan u harakat kardan tan, likin mard zadan man jump and move body, but man hit zamin earth/dirt ‘The man puts the pieces on his body and climbs the pile. The man jumps and moves his body, but the man hits the ground (falls)’



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The most common temporal marker by far in the speech of both participants was hala. For MN at Time 1, for instance, hala represents 93.8% of her temporal marking and at Time 2 it accounted for 69%. Vaxt moxtalef was only used once (by LC at Time 1). Participants also used some temporal relative clauses. However, they were uncommon. In summary, although there was some variation both within and between participants in how particular GFSs were encoded, this variation was not due to wild fluctuations in lexical items. In fact, there was no variation in participant’s choice of a pleonastic pronoun and almost no variation in temporal markers. The variation we did find was primarily due to variation in general plural markers. However, even this showed a high degree of consistency. Syntactic Patterns and Complexity We examined participants’ productions to determine the level of syntactic complexity in their speech. Syntactic complexity is difficult to define absolutely in a theory-neutral way, so our measures are rough operationalizations of complexity. We used two different measures. The first measure is the simplest: we coded each sentence according to its word order pattern. This provides an idea of sentence length, as well as the variety of orders used by the participants.16 Second, we examined complexity in terms of the number of verbs contained in each sentence. We reasoned that a sentence containing multiple verbs either has multiple clauses, or one verb is functioning as an auxiliary or modal verb. In either case, a sentence with multiple verbs is both conceptually and syntactically more complex than a sentence with a single verb. Word orders. The sentences produced by the participants were predominantly SVO, likely indicating an underlying English-based syntactic frame.17 That is to say, Farsi lexical items seemed to be superimposed upon 16 Some readers might wonder why we did not use Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), a measure of sentence length often used in the child language acquisition literature. Unfortunately, however, MLU does not provide a very accurate picture of sentential complexity once it goes beyond three morphemes per utterance (Klee & Fitzgerald, 1985), a level our participants had already surpassed by Time 1. 17 As pointed out by one reviewer, SVO is very common in pidgin and creole languages, and may even be found in languages where the super and substrate languages had different predominant orders. It has been proposed that SVO order is a universal of creole languages (see


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Table 3. Syntactic Types Produced at Week 10 (as a percentage of the total sentences) Participant Structure

LC

MN

SVO SVO(V) SVO(VO) SV S(V)V SVOPP SVO(VOPP) SVO(V)PP SVPP S(VPP)VOPP PPVS SADJP SVADJP

49.9

28.9 6.4 3.2 17.9 1.3 11.2 3.5 1.1 14.4 1.3 1.6 1.1

1.5 12.8 11

8.3 7 1.4 5.4

an English-based skeletal sentence frame. When sentences deviated from English word order, it was typically due to a self-correction or expansion begun mid-sentence. The percentages of sentences of each syntactic type produced by participants at week 10 are shown in Table 3. The table only includes orders produced at least 1% of the time and so the percentages do not total to 100%. Brackets indicate a repetition of all or part of the sentence. When the bracketed constituent comes first, as in S(V)V it indicates that the participant initially produced an incorrect word and self-corrected their mistake. When the bracketed constituent follows, it indicates a repetition, with or

Romaine, 1988, Chapter 2, for a presentation of various proposals regarding creole universals), and that even when SVO order is found in the superstrate and or substrate languages its appearance in the creole is not due to super or substratal influence (Bickerton, 1981, 1984). This position seems unnecessarily extreme, however. It is more likely that there is some universal tendency toward SVO order in new, morphologically poor languages, and that this tendency is reinforced by similarities in the superstrate and substrate languages (see Mufwene, 1986, on the relationship between the roles of superstrate languages, substrate languages, and linguistic universals more generally). (Especially given the fact that word order is one of the few things that adult second language learners are able to learn with success, Johnson and Newport, 1989. Thus, the fact that many creoles with European lexifiers that have SVO word order also have SVO word order may just be coincidental). However, given that there was no superstrate, and so much of what our participants do seems to be based on English, it seems most likely that the SVO order in our language is from English.



43

without expansion, a conversational device that is perfectly licit in English, for example, ‘The dog licked the horse, licked the horse on the leg’. MN, the participant with the larger vocabulary, produced the fewest SVO sentences and the greatest number of different sentence types. Many of these sentence types are expansions on more basic structures, and likely indicate a decreased reliance on the basic SVO sentence and so are indicative of greater flexibility in her productions. Multi-verb utterances. Both participants produced a large number of sentences containing multiple verbs at both Time 1 and Time 2. We found many examples of simple conjoined sentences, as well as sentences containing relative clauses. There were numerous sentences with matrix verbs taking sentential complements, such as ‘think’ and ‘want’. Participants also produced desideratives, quotatives, and causatives, although these were less numerous, as well as a few examples of ‘go’ used as an auxiliary verb, one sentence containing the modal ‘can’, and one infinitival purpose clause.18 Table 4 shows the percentages of utterances containing multiple verbs for both participants at Times 1 and 2. The overall data are then broken down by categories of multi-verb constructions, showing the percentage of the multi-verb sentences containing each of the different kinds of multi-verb constructions. The percentages do not total to 100%, since many of the multi-verb sentences contained more than two verbs, with the result that the same sentence can be included in more than one category. For instance, a sentence with both a relative clause and a conjunction is counted twice, once in the relative clause category and once in the conjoined sentence category. In contrast, a sentence with two examples of the same type is only counted once. For example, a sentence that consists of 3 conjoined clauses is counted only once (in the conjoined sentence category). The sentences in 5–7 are examples of sentences containing multiple

18 There was also one unclassifiable sentence, shown below. It is either a progressive with ‘be’ acting as an auxiliary verb, or a copular construction with the verb ‘cry’ used as an adjective meaning sad.

(i)

Nou zan bashad gerie kardan New woman it-is-so cry ‘The new wife is/was crying’ or ‘The new wife is/was sad’


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Table 4. Production of Multi-verb Sentences by Type Participant LC

MN

Sentence Type

Time 1

Time 2

Time 1

Time 2

Multi-verb

41

81

67.9

60.5

Conjoined Relative Clause Quotative Desiderative Go – Future Scomp Causative Can – Modal Purpose

56.3 25 31.3

70.6 5.9

52.8 41.7 38.9 11.1 20

30.3 39.1 4.3 4.4 4.4 43.5

23.5

5.9 3.1 2.8

Note. Data for Multi-verb are percentage of total sentences. Data for all others are percentage of Multi-verb sentences.

verbs, and two of these sentences were included in more than one category. Sentence 5 (MN, Time 1) has a relative clause. Sentence 6 (AS, Time 2) is included in the conjoined and desiderative categories. Sentence 7 (MN, Time 1) is included in the can-modal, conjoined, quotative, and go-future categories. (5) Hala bache zan ki bashad az mahal ki dashtan now child woman who it-is-so from place who have daraxt u kohne mard daxel shodan kanah tree and old man enter house ‘the girl who is from the place that has trees (forest) and the old man enter/entered the house’ (6) Parande parvaz kardan u mard xastan parvaz kardan bird fly and man want fly ‘The bird flies/is flying and the man wants to fly’ (7) Chiz thing bache child

tava nestan harf zadan u chiz harf zadan kohne mard can speak and thing speak old man zan raftan dashtan bishtar zar woman go have more money



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‘the thing can speak and the thing says “the old man’s girl is going to have lots of money”’ Since our objective was to characterize the syntactic complexity of the sentences produced by the participants, we also examined the data for any sentences which appeared to have more than one clause but which were not included in the previous analysis, due to a possibly missing verb. We found 6 such sentences in the data. All were produced by LC at Time 1 and represent 13% of her utterances at that time. All were existential or copular constructions not containing bashad. One contained a relative clause, one was a quotative, and the other four were simple conjoined sentences. Importantly, they were similar in meaning (if not identical) to other sentences also produced by LC that did contain bashad. MN, the participant with the higher vocabulary scores, produced a greater number of different types of multi-verb constructions, both within each testing session and overall. She was consistent in the percentage of utterances containing multiple verbs over the two testing sessions. However, the proportion of her multi-verb utterances that were simple conjoined sentences decreased over time. As simple conjoined sentences are the least syntactically complex of the multi-verb utterances we examined, this indicates a slight increase in her ability to produce more complex syntactic structures. LC, on the other hand, produced fewer different kinds of multi-verb constructions than MN, but the proportion of multi-verb utterances in her speech increased remarkably from Time 1 to Time 2. This increase was mostly due an increase in the proportion of simple conjoined sentences she produced. Overall Summary of the Results In summary, at Time 1 MN produced many words that appeared to serve grammatical functions and complex combinatorial structures, and she continued to perform at this high level at Time 2. There was a small increase in the complexity of her multi-verb utterances over time. In contrast, while LC always produced informative content words, she initially produced fewer CSSs and less GFS. By Time 2, however, LC’s performance had improved greatly, and in some areas had reached essentially the same level of combinatorial complexity demonstrated by MN. These differences in the production of GFS and CSS were mirrored by the participants’ performance on vocabulary tests. MN performed very well on the vocabulary test at week 5 and maintained


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this high level through to week 10. In contrast, LC performed much more poorly on the vocabulary test at week 5, but had improved greatly by week 10. Importantly, by week 10 these differences in performance on the vocabulary tests were due almost exclusively to differences in participants’ ability to produce content words. At this point, their knowledge of FWs did not differ.

Discussion The Presence of GFS and CSS in Pidgin Languages Contrary to many descriptions of pidgin languages we found a high degree of functional structure in the speech of our two participants. This structure took the form of frequent occurrences of copulas, existentials, and marking of plurals, as well as fairly consistent use of lexical items to encode these grammatical categories. While there was, to be sure, some variation in the lexical items used to mark plurals, this was not wildly fluctuating variation. It was primarily in the form of alternations between two or three alternatives. As such, we view their marking of plurals as being indicative of functional structure, at least at some emergent stage in the development of the language. Our participants also used more complex sentence structures than would be expected given the typical descriptions of pidgin languages. 63% of the sentences they produced contained more than one verb, with most of these being multi-clausal sentences. While many of these were simple conjoined sentences (S ‘and’ S), others were more complex, ranging from sentences with relative clauses (both subject and object), to causatives and desideratives. However, much like the examples of early Hawaiian pidgin studied by Roberts (1998), we found fairly infrequent marking of temporal relations. By the end of the study when their grammars seemed to have stabilized somewhat, both participants were using discourse level temporal marking around 33–34% of the time This is quite a bit higher than the levels of tense/aspect marking in non-native HPE speech reported by Roberts. However, the constructions we counted as temporal marking are different from those of Roberts, who looked at serial verb-like constructions. Indeed, when we look at this aspect of our data we find less temporal marking. We found no instances of pastness being expressed (nor would we expect it given the stories that were told), but we did find some multi-verb constructions used



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to express future tense. LC did not use any such constructions, but MN used raftan ‘go’ to indicate future in both test sessions, as is evident in Table 4. (The lower proportion of these constructions in the data from the second test session are due mainly to the differing content of the stories told on the two days). This reliance on discourse level temporal marking is similar to the situation found in early Tok Pisin (Labov, 1990). The Relationship between Lexical Competence and GFS and CSS But what about the predictions made by the LCH? Having established the presence of GFS and CSSs in the speech of our participants, we can move on to examine the specific relationship between the production of GFS and CSSs and lexical competence, asking whether the predictions made by the LCH are borne out. Overall, our data support the hypothesis that an increase in lexical competence leads to and supports an increase in the production of GFS and CSS. Firstly, we found a difference between the amount of GFS and CSSs produced by the two participants, and this difference correlated with their performance on the vocabulary tests. MN, the more lexically competent participant, produced more GFS, was more consistent in how she encoded the GFS, produced more multi-verb utterances (both as a proportion of her total utterances and by the number of different types she produced), and relied less on standard SVO sentence order. Second, LC, the less lexically competent participant, improved on all of these measures over time. Correspondingly, she improved her performance on the vocabulary tests over time. That is, as her lexical competence improved, so did her production of GFS and CSSs. LC’s lexical competence improved both in terms of function words and content words, and some of her increased production of GFS and CSS is likely due to increased knowledge of the function words themselves. However, by week 10, participants’ knowledge of function items was equivalent. Crucially, then, any differences in vocabulary test performance at this time were due to differences in participants’ knowledge of content words. Thus, any differences remaining between participants’ use of GFS and CSS could not simply be attributed to a generalized problem with function words which included both a lack of lexical knowledge and therefore, lack of use in sentences, but must instead be due to something else. We submit that this enduring difference in their productions is due to their differing knowledge of content words, and that LC’s problem with content words is disrupting her ability to


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consistently produce GFS and CSS. There was also a change in the kinds of multi-verb sentences that MN produced: she produced a higher proportion of more complex constructions at Time 2. This was despite equivalent knowledge of vocabulary items at the two times. However, recall that lexical competence as defined earlier includes two components, vocabulary size and ease of lexical access, both of which serve to reduce the amount of cognitive resources directed towards lexical access. Recall also that time spent speaking the language is predicted to cause increased lexical competence. Thus, while we might not expect increased lexical competence over a five week time period in an 18 year-old’s L1, we would expect increased lexical competence in a new language over this same time period. Given this, the gains made by MN in sentential complexity are not unexpected, and are likely due to more efficient and, therefore, faster lexical access. There are a few studies other studies that have examined the relationship between vocabulary and GFS, albeit not from the perspective that we are advocating (constraints on working memory). Bates, Bretherton, and Snyder (1988), for example, examined the relationship between lexical acquisition and the onset of the production of multiword utterances in children learning English in the US. They found a strong positive correlation; children who knew more words, measured by production and comprehension, began combining words earlier. Furthermore, this relationship lasted beyond the onset of two-word speech. Children with larger lexicons prior to the onset of multi-word speech were also ahead in terms of their production of closed class morphemes later on. Caselli et al. (1995) replicated these findings in children learning Italian as their L1, demonstrating that the relationship between lexical and grammatical development is not just particular to children learning English. The relationship between lexical competence and GFS has also been demonstrated in a study of adult L2 acquisition of Russian (Brooks & Kempe, 2000). In all previous studies examining the relationship between aspects of lexical competence and the expression of GFS and CSS it has been possible to contend that the positive results demonstrate a simple correlation due to generally superior learning skills. Better learners are simply better at learning both lexical items and GFS and CSS, and that as an individual learner progresses in one area they are also progressing in the other. However, in our study participants did not learn any new syntactic structure. They were not taught Farsi syntax (or any other syntax). Moreover, the structure underlying



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their Pidgin Farsi productions was heavily influenced by English. Since both were native English speakers and neither reported any history of language related disorders we can assume that they were both equally competent in the basic grammar of the new language. Since our participants were not learning any GFS or CSSs, an explanation based solely on differences in the general learning abilities between our participants fails to capture the relationship demonstrated in our data. Despite the fact that their knowledge of the underlying structure, and, by week 10, their knowledge of function words, was the same, their productions were not. Importantly, then, this difference (in the production of GFS and CSS) between LC and MN cannot be attributed simply to differing general learning abilities. Our data, therefore, suggest that the relationship is one of dependency: the production of GFS and CSS is dependent on lexical competence. It may additionally be the case that both depend on the same underlying ability, and thus, that learners who have better working memories will be better at learning both structure and lexical items. This would predict greater increases in the production of GFS and CSS for better learners than for poorer learners who are making the same gains in lexical competence. This is perfectly compatible with our model. However, this is not the whole picture, as is demonstrated by our data. Additional Findings – Substrate Influence We found a very strong influence of English grammar on the grammar of the pidgin developed by the participants during this study. For example, subjects were very rarely omitted in contexts where English required them, but were frequently omitted in contexts where English allows deletion or PRO to occur. And complex sentences were very obviously based on the structure of similar English sentences. The high degree of influence from English in our language may lead some readers to reject the idea that the language creation witnessed in our study has any relevance to studies of pidgin and creole formation. However, we would remind sceptics of languages like Lingala and Kituba (often referred to as koines). These languages have more marked features than most pidgins, retaining at least some of the morphological distinctions present in their lexifiers (Sebba, 1997). This is likely enabled by the high degree of structural similarity found in the languages involved in the contact (Mufwene, 1984). As argued by Singler (1988), the greater the homogeneity in the substrates, the greater their influence. Our participants shared the same native language, creating a situation with the


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highest possible degree of structural similarity. While the outcome in this experiment is distinct from the outcome in most pidgin situations, we believe that the processes involved are the same. Further evidence for this position comes from results of the Master et al. (1989) study. Many of their participants were not native English speakers, but English was a language shared by all their participants, and they were aware of this fact. Although Master et al. conclude that the structure of their pidgin was not substantially affected by English, this conclusion seems to be based on the existence of sentences with non-English word orders and not their frequency. Most of the examples provided in their paper do follow English word order. We submit, therefore, that it may be more correct to state that while some sentences deviated from English word order, most did not, and thus, that English did influence the grammar of the experimental pidgin in Master et al. This influence was probably due to the fact that English was a language known to all participants: they all had access to a common underlying grammar. Research on International Sign also supports this position. International Sign is the name given to the signing produced at gatherings of signers with different native languages (Newport & Supalla, 2000; Supalla & Webb, 1995). Supalla and Webb (1995) found evidence for the use of verbal agreement for person and number, aspect marking, and non-canonical sentence forms. This complexity is likely enabled by the high degree of shared features seen in the signed languages of the world, as well as the nature of those features. Because signed languages are produced in the visuo-spatial medium, they have the opportunity to use space grammatically, and most signed languages take advantage of this (Newport & Supalla, 2000). While still arbitrary, points in space are highly iconic, and it may, therefore, be easier to maintain complexity in an incipient pidgin or jargon when the use of space is a possible grammatical device (cf. Supalla & Webb, 1995). Importantly, the use of space as a grammatical device is shared among those who use IS, despite their different primary languages. In the current study, when the grammar of the pidgin differed from English it was in how the functional structures were encoded. For instance, while English uses primarily nominal suffixes to indicate plurality and verbal suffixes to indicate tense/aspect information, our participants did not innovate any affixal morphology, nor did they import the relevant affixes from English. From a purely communicative standpoint, importing affixes from English



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would have been very efficient since they were shared by both participants. However, they did not do this. This indicates that they did not think they were just speaking English using different words. It also, more importantly perhaps, reiterates that substratal transfer is not a simple matter. For instance, the tendency to mark something is often transferred without the actual mechanism (Odlin, 1989), and the mechanism of encoding may be influenced by both the superstrate and substrate languages. Andersen (1979) found that Spanish L1 speakers often produce sequences such as flute’s lessons, a construction that is ungrammatical in Spanish and English. The Spanish translation of flute lessons includes a genitive marker, but it is the equivalent of lessons of flute. The Spanish speakers apparently had figured out that -s is a genitive marker in English and were using it in the same contexts as they would Spanish genitive marker. Interestingly, they were not just using a word-for-word translation of the Spanish, which they could have done since English does have a genitive construction like the one found in Spanish and these same speakers were aware of it, evidenced by the fact that they often produced possessives of the form NP of NP, e.g. the house of my cousin. We found a similar pattern in our study. The words chosen to indicate plurality were always used in front of the noun they modified, as they would if they were functioning as quantifiers and not as plural markers. If they were simply imitating English in a simple, direct manner, we would have expected the plural marker to follow the noun (since in English plural is indicated by a suffix). The words that were becoming function words in the pidgin behaved in accord with the syntactic category participants believed the word to have in the source language (Farsi), in conjunction with the behavior of words of this category in English, not in accord with the behavior of the corresponding functional elements in English. That is, if they thought the word was an adverb in Farsi, they used it as they would use an adverb in English, despite the fact that it was not serving as an adverb in the sentence. Clearly, there is significant, but sometimes non-straightforward, substrate influence. But the ultimate objective of our experiment was not simply to find GFS and CSS in an experimental pidgin, nor was it to demonstrate the pervasive influence of substrate languages. It was to demonstrate that a pidgin could acquire more GFS and CSS over time through increasing lexical competence on the part of its speakers, and thus explain why vernacularization, which leads to increased lexical competence, leads to functional expansion. The results of our experiment clearly indicate that this is indeed possible. And


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when our results are considered in conjunction with the studies on language acquisition, production, and comprehension we reviewed, they provide strong support for our model of the mechanisms behind expansion. Limitations of the Present Study Our finding that incipient pidgin languages may contain at least some GFS is in direct contradiction to the claims made by Bickerton concerning HPE (and pidgins in general) (Bickerton, 1981, 1984), as well as studies of pidgins like Chinook Jargon and Russenorsk. The contrasts with languages like Chinook Jargon and Russenorsk are not surprising: they are just what the vernacularization hypothesis, with or without the Lexical Competence Hypothesis, would predict, since they were not vernaculars (ignoring Grand Ronde). But the lack of GFS and CSS in Hawaiian is more surprising (Bickerton, 1981, 1984; Bickerton & Givón, 1978; Roberts, 1998): by all accounts, the pidgin (HPE) served as a vernacular for its speakers. We suggest that the historical records of HPE may not accurately reflect the competence (or even the true performance) of pidgin speakers. We here review a few possible reasons for this discrepancy. First, some discrepancies may be due to chance. A particular form or feature may have been used with such rarity that it never shows up in the recorded sample. The examples of pre-nativized bin and go discussed above, for instance, suggest the possibility that functional structure may have been rare enough that it was simply not well documented. Another possibility is that the recorders themselves were biased. Often, language data are drawn from travelers’ accounts of the curious customs they encountered overseas, or educators’ complaints about the difficulty of teaching children who spoke such “corrupt” versions of the language (Pichardo, 1849, cited in Van Name, 1871; Schuchardt, 1980). People assumed the target language to be the superstrate and were often concerned with noting deficiencies, not newly emerging patterns. Additionally, what they heard was always filtered through their previous (prescriptive) knowledge of the European lexifiers, which sometimes lead to recorders to impose more lexifier-like patterns on the pidgin/creole than were actually present (Keesing, 1988). A third possible explanation is more systematic. Many of the records uncovered and studied by Roberts (1998) were court records. Given the formal nature of the setting in which these language samples were recorded, it is quite possible that speakers were attempting to modify their speech to more closely approximate the standard. This could easily have led to a reduction



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in distinct pidgin or creole features without a subsequent increase in the use of forms from the standard language. For instance, HPE speakers might have been aware that preverbal tense/aspect marking was not Standard English without actually knowing how to mark tense in English. Keesing (1988) suggests that might have occurred in some of the records of Melanesian Pidgin. He notes that when testifying, some Melanesian Pidgin speakers seem to use a mixture of English and pidgin. He further notes that the pidgin they used in court seems to be of a different register than that used for communication among Islanders. Both of these factors may have lead to the recording of speech patterns that were likely not characteristic of real Melanesian Pidgin. The Heidelberger Forschungsprojekt “Pidgin-Deutsch” (1978) reports this kind of pattern in the naturalistically acquired L2 German of foreign workers. Workers who had been in the country for less than 4 years used very few modals. Workers who had been in the country for over 6 years seemed to have acquired the modal system. Workers who had been in the country 4-6 years also used modals frequently, but these speakers relied very heavily on müssen ’must’, often using it when not appropriate. Upon closer examination, it appears that these speakers had acquired knowledge about the use of tense and aspect in German and were using müssen to carry the tense and aspect marking, instead of as a modal. This very unusual pattern demonstrates that linguistic awareness can show up as an error. Thus it is possible that some of the samples of HPE speech contain artificially low rates of production of pidgin GFS. Another possibility (at least for the lack of CSS) is that the pidgin speakers simply dispreferred the missing constructions. An example of speech differences attributable to differing preferences can be found in dialects of English. People have noticed that Indian English differs from British English, especially in the construction of negatives. Aitchison and Agnihotri (1985) showed that possible (grammatical) negative constructions do not differ between the two varieties, however. They asked speakers to convert a set of positive sentences into negative ones, and where possible, to provide multiple options. Speakers were also asked to rate the options they provided from most to least preferred. They found that the options provided did not differ, but preferences did, explaining the perception of difference between the two varieties of English. What is grammatical does not differ between


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the two dialects, but what is actually produced by speakers does.19 Thus, structures may be unattested in spontaneous samples of pidgin speech simply by chance, or for other reasons such as recorder bias, incomplete linguistic knowledge, or speaker preferences. While the data from this experiment support the Lexical Competence Hypothesis, the high degree of GFS and CSS we found may cause some to doubt that the language creation process we witnessed was pidgin or creole formation, and, therefore, that no conclusions relevant to pidgin/creole formation can be drawn from the experiment. Here, we address some differences between the situation in which our language was formed and that typical of pidgin/creole formation. We discuss how these differences in context might lead to differences in outcome without proposing that different mechanisms underlie the different outcomes; that is, we discuss how the same mechanism could produce a language with high levels of GFS and CSS and a language with low levels of GFS and CSS. Unlike in true pidgin creation situations, both of our participants shared the same L1. They also shared similar levels of experience with another language, French. This resulted in a situation where the structures underlying the sentences produced by one participant were always accessible by the other. In principle it could not occur that one participant produced a sentence that was unreconstructable by the other. (Of course, some communication difficulties did occur. For instance, the differences in lexical knowledge occasionally caused misunderstandings.) This could have made it easier for the participants to converge on a similar grammar, and thus, allowed for the inclusion of greater degrees of GFS and syntactic complexity, if not in toto, then at least at an earlier point in the development of the language. Similar suggestions have been made by Singler (1988) with regard to pidgins and creoles, (see Keesing, 1988, with regard to Melanesian Pidgin more specifi-

19

Similar examples can be found in language development. In contexts where adults would produce a relative clause to make a distinction between referents, children learning English typically use prepositional phrases. For example, instead of saying “the boy gave the dog to the bear who is holding the wagon” children say, “the boy gave the dog to the bear with the wagon”. This persists at least until children are school-age. Researchers using elicitation experiments, however, have managed to induce 3 and 4 year-olds to reliably produce both subject and object relative clauses (Tager-Flusberg, 1982), demonstrating that young children have the underlying competence to produce relative clauses despite the fact that they do not spontaneously produce them.



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cally), Mufwene (1984) with regard to koines, and Siegel (1997) with regard to indiginized varieties; shared (underlying) structures lead to earlier emergence and stabilization of GFS. Ideally, one would like to be able to conduct a similar experiment with individuals who do not share a language, native or otherwise. (Unfortunately, this would, in reality, be quite difficult). This would more closely resemble true pidgin/creole formation. Along these same lines, one could see how different combinations of native languages affect the resultant language, more directly testing the notion that shared underlying structure leads to faster emergence of GFS and CSS. Second, in the case of real pidgin formation there is a superstrate language which is the target of learning, regardless of the success or failure of that learning.20 In the case of our experiment there was no real superstrate to act as a target. This may have led to a greater influence of the substrate language than normal, since there was no possibility for structure to come 20 We realize that our position on target languages in pidgin/creole genesis is not uncontroversial. Baker (1997), states ‘the directional concept of target language has no relevance to most cases of pidgin or creole genesis: most pidgins and creoles are examples of language creation rather than the consequences of failed language learning’ (p. 91). At first glance, this seems to be a highly reasonable assumption. Afterall, it seems unlikely that a group of speakers who managed to learn so much vocabulary could fail to learn any grammar, so the lack of lexifier grammar in most pidgins and creoles strongly supports the language creation idea. Thomason & Kaufman (1988) exemplify another position – lack of adequate access to the TL precluding any real learning of the TL grammar. These two assumptions are both supported by much of the work on adult L2 acquisition: while not as good at language learning as children, adults do not typically completely fail at acquiring the grammatical stuff of their language (Birdsong, 1999; Johnson & Newport, 1989). However, this is less true when considering untutored adult L2 acquisition. In fact, the final, fossilized grammars of many untutored adult language learners look very much like pidgins and creoles in many respects, even with a high degree of access to the TL (Clements, 2001a, 2001b; Perdue, 1993). (Similarities even extend to the creation of individual tense/aspect systems using adverbs, Perdue and Klein, 1993). Furthermore, if lexifiers are not targets, then one should not see any superstrate grammar in creoles. DeGraff (2001), however, argues that Haitian Creole evinces a great deal of French Grammar. It is also unclear what the input p/c creators received actually looked like, an important factor when relying on differences between the pidgin/creole and lexifier to argue for the lack of a TL. It is unclear that learners were always exposed to full, native-speaker varieties of the lexifiers. There may have been some simplification done by the superstrate speakers (e.g. foreigner talk varieties, Ferguson, 1971; Mühlhäusler, 1986), and many of the models to which learners had access may not have been native speakers (Keesing, 1988). There is the additional tangle that the many of the models were not speakers of the standard varieties of the superstrate (Mühlhäusler, 1986). All of these points make comparisons between pidgins and creoles and the prescriptive lexifier varieties somewhat problematic, especially when using differences between them as evidence against the existence of a target for language learning.


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from any other language. (Although, of course, universals were also a possible source.) This same factor may also have an effect on the complexity of the sentences the participants produced. Recall from the prior discussion of theories of production that one of the processes that must occur in the planning of an utterance is the construction of the (ordered) constituents. If a speaker is exerting effort to recall the correct way to construct sentences in a TL (superstrate), it can interfere with other parts of the sentence construction process. This could divert resources required for maintaining lemmas in a working memory store while a complex sentence is being constructed, resulting in simpler sentences. However, we believe that our participants also suffered from interference of this kind. They were constantly trying to figure out the best way to construct a sentence without any explicit instructions regarding how to do so. They were often unsure as to how to construct a sentence, and so expended processing resources on actively planning the syntax of the sentences they used. While this is different from attempting to recall the syntax of the target language, it too uses up resources, and thus may divert them from other parts of the production process (albeit possibly to a lesser extent). Finally, our results are from an experiment, with everything that that entails. Participants were taught the vocabulary; pidgin/creole creators were presumably not taught an entire lexicon (although they may have been explicitly taught a few words here and there). Second, we gave them English glosses for each item, likely encouraging greater transfer of semantic and syntactic information associated with the item, for instance, the participants’ use of anja ‘there’ as a pleonastic pronoun. This is not necessarily indicative of complete and total relexification of English with Farsi words, however, since it does happen in situations of L2 acquisition (Odlin, 1989). Despite having some possibly undesirable consequences, this teaching was necessary for methodological reasons. It allowed the experiment to be conducted in a much shorter time period as we did not have to wait for participants to extract word boundaries, meanings, etc. from speech. It also allowed us to investigate the relationship between lexical competence and the emergence of structure apart from syntactic learning effects. (Lexical competence and syntactic learning effects would have been confounded had we exposed the participants to a language instead.) The social context in which our language was created was also quite different from that of real pidgin/creole languages. It was not quite like a



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pidgin formation situation, in that participants were required to use the new language to talk about a wide range of things, including many of the topics that are indicative of vernacularization. But it was also different from the situations in which abrupt creoles form, because it was only used a few hours each week, presumably less often than a true vernacular. It would be quite interesting to see what effect restricting conversation topics, to trade for instance, might have on the linguistic outcome: whether that would induce less GFS and CSS than we saw in the current experiment. Because of these differences between the context of our lab and real pidgin/creole formation, the language our participants created was neither a true pidgin nor a true creole. However, we were not investigating pidgin formation, nor were we investigating creolization per se; we were investigating the relationship between lexical competence and the use of GFS and CSS and relating this to the grammatical expansion seen in creolization. We are not making any claims about how much GFS and CSS pidgins and creoles should have, only about how it emerges when it does. In this respect, the high degree of GFS and CSS we found is not so problematic: We attempted to create an environment in our experiment that was as GFS- and CSS-friendly as possible in order to induce their production within the restricted time-span of the experiment, and we succeeded. There are several other variables, some central to long-standing issues in pidgin/creole studies, that could be profitably examined using experimental methods similar to those used in the present study. Much has been made about the age of “creolizers”, and it would be very interesting to see how children would respond in an experiment like ours. Work examining the relationship between language and cognition suggests that children rely more on universals than do adults. Lucy and Gaskins (2001) discuss several studies demonstrating that the particular way an individual’s native language divides up meanings affects non-linguistic behavior such as categorization. However, these effects are not seen in young children; they do not show up until midto late childhood. If these effects are related to the kind of language specific categories that are part of sentence conceptualization, then we would expect fewer language specific categories and more universal categories in laboratory pidgins created by children. If this is the case, that children are more able to access universals, it might also be the case that they can contribute more new structure to creoles than we contend.


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It would also be of great interest to investigate the effect of group size on the experimental outcome. It is quite likely that having only one possible interlocutor made it easier for our participants to negotiate the structure of the language, and therefore easier to quickly agree on structural norms. It is interesting to note that in the Master et al. (1989) study, groups consisted of four and eight individuals. (There were two groups.) They report that their participants did not develop any functional morphology, nor did they use CSSs. This suggests that group size may be an important factor in the grammatical complexity of an emerging language. However, their findings were actually that there were no grammatical affixes in the laboratory pidgin. It is possible that their participants had begun to develop some variable GFS in the form of free-standing lexical items, as was the case in our experiment. That this might have occurred is suggested by the data from a lexical survey they conducted, in which they asked participants to directly translate a word or phrase from English into the pidgin. Many of the English items were grammatical or functional in nature, such as temporal reference. Although many of these items were novel to participants (they had not been previously presented to them), there was some consistency in their answers, suggesting that at least some of the terms might have been developed by participants during their interactions. However, even if it actually is the case that there was some GFS and CSSs in the Master et al. laboratory pidgin, we would not be able to conclude that the size of the group has no effect on the outcome of language creation: although larger than our group size of two, four is still a small group as compared to en entire community. This variable certainly deserves further exploration. Of course, of greatest interest to many pidgin and creole researchers are the interactions between the variables of age, group size, and language background. Interactions cannot be meaningfully investigated, however, without some basic understanding of the individual contributions of each of the variables of interest. There is clearly much interesting and relevant work still to be done in this area.

CONCLUSION In summary, the current data support the proposed relationship between lexical competence and the overt expression of GFS and CSSs. Although



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our data are from a case study (and thus, are more suggestive than truly conclusive), when considered in conjunction with the results of other studies on language acquisition, production, and comprehension, our results support the Lexical Competence Hypothesis of pidgin and creole development. This hypothesis proposes that the increase in functional structure seen in the transition from early pidgin to creole is related to the decrease in processing resources needed for production when lexical competence increases. This increase in lexical competence is a result of the increased use of the language that occurs with vernacularization. The proposal thus augments the vernacularization hypothesis, by providing a cognitive explanation for the changes accompanying a social phenomenon. Increased lexical competence is the mechanism underlying the changes that accompany vernacularization. APPENDICES Appendix A Function Words English Gloss all and ask but can continue finish from go guess have help how I in it is so know

Farsi Word hame* u soal kardan* likin tavanestan edame kardan* tamum kardan* az raftan tasavor kardan* dashtan komak* chun man tu bashad danestan*

make, do more no not now off on out quantity start talk there think to want what when

kardan bishtar* naxeir nai hala* jefe ruje ker xadr* shoru kardan* harf zardan* anja fekr kardan* ba xastan che kai


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where who why

ku ki chira

yes you

bale shoma

Content Words English Gloss Farsi Word air hava angry xazabnak back posht bad bad beans lubia beautiful kashang belt tanab big bozorg bird parande blood xun blue nilah body tan book kitab brain maxz bread nan break shekastan burn suxtan call sada kardan car araba carry bordan catch negah goshtan change avaz kardan chest sine chicken juje child bache clear saf climb bola raftan closed, locked bast cloth parche cloud tarik

coffee color come corner correct cow cross cry dead descend different dig direction dress drink dumb ear earth, dirt easy eat egg eight encircle enter exceed exit eye face fail far

xahve rang rashidan gushe dorost gav obur kardan gerie kardan morde defa moxtalef kandan taraf lebas xordan ahmax gush zamin asan xordan toxme morx hasht mohasere kardan daxel shodan tajavoz kardan xoruj cheshm surat nashodan dur



fear finger, toe fire fish five flour flower fly (V) follow four fruit give glass goat good grass grow hair hand hang happy hard hat head hear heart here hit hole, cave horse hour house insect jump kiss leg less

tarsidan angosht atesh mahi panj ard gol parvaz kardan dombal kardan chahar mive dadan shishe boz xub giah bozorg shodan mu dast avizan kardan xoshhal seft kolah sar shenidan del inja zadan surax asb bidam kanah hasharat jastan busidan pa kam

lie light live man meat meet metal middle milk money monkey mouth move near new nine nose oil old one open pants pass piece pig pile place plant plastic play pull push put rat read ready

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dorux goftan roushan zende mard gusht molaxat kardan felezz markaz shir zar meimun dahan harakat kardan nazdik nou noh bini rouxan kohne yek baz shalvar radd kardan tekke xuk tude mahal kashtan pelastik bazi kardan kashidan holdodan gozashtan mush xandan hazer


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receive red repeat resemble rice ripe road room round run salt same school see seed, nut seven shape shirt shoe sick side sign similar simple sit six sky small smart smell smooth soft sound speak squeeze

gereftan ahmar tekrar kardan shabih budan berenj poxte rah otax gerd davidan namak hamin maktab didan toxm haft shekl pirahan kafsh mariz taraf neshan mesl sade neshastan shish asaman kuchek bahush bu kardan hamvar narm seda harf zadan gereftan

stand stay step stick into stomach stone strong suffer sugar swim take off taste tea ten thick thin thing three throw time tired touch tree two understand walk wash water weak wear woman word write yellow

istadan mundan xadam gozashtan shekam sang nirumand kashidan shekar shena kardan kandan chashidan chai dah koloft barik chiz se andaxtan vaxt xaste lams kardan daraxt do fahmidan rahraftan shostan ab zaif pushidan zan sukhun neveshtan asfar



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Appendix B Here we present two passages from narratives included in our analyses, one from each participant. We have included the speech of both participants, so the passages below include interruptions such as requests for repetitions, clarifications, etc. We have also left in all self-interruptions, repetitions, and recasts. Although this makes the passages more difficult to read, and thus is not always done in similar data presentations (cf. Perdue, 1993), we feel it gives a clearer picture of the language used by our participants. We have included very minimal punctuation in these passages, since punctuation is governed by language specific conventions, which of course, do not exist for this laboratory pidgin. We use periods to indicate the end of an utterance (marked by prosody), and ellipsis to indicate a long pause, usually mid-utterance. The punctuation in the English glosses provides a rough guide to prosodic structure within an utterance. Narrative 1 – MN Time 1 (This is an excerpt from the middle of the retelling of a Swedish folk-tale called “Father Frost”. Previous to the passage below, a man with a daughter has remarried after the death of his first wife. The new wife has her own daughter and does not like her new step daughter. She asks the man to take his daughter out into the forest and leave her there to die. While in the forest, Father Frost comes to help the girl, and gives her furs and blankets to keep her warm, and gold and other riches. He then takes her back to her house. It is at this point in the story that this excerpt begins). (1) MN: Kai kohne mard didan bache zan kohne mard bashad xoshhal. Ba kanah, nou zan xordan u kardan nan u mive. Nou zan dashtan chiz ki bashad zende chiz harf zadan, bow-wow, chiz bashad narm dashtan chahar pa. Chiz tavanestan harf zadan, u chiz harf zadan kohne mard bache zan raftan dashtan bishtar zar. (2) LC: Chiz harf zadan ba kohne mard? (3) MN: No chiz harf zadan ba nou zan. Kohne mard bashad mahal ki daraxt. OK. Chiz harf zadan bache zan raftan dashtan bishtar zar.


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(4) LC: Dashtan che? (5) MN: Dashtan bishtar zar. U bache zan raftan bashad kashang u bache zan raftan molaxat kardan mard ki dashtan bishtar zar u ki bashad kashang u mard u bache zan (6) LC (interupts): Mard ki zende ba kanah dashtan bishtar zar? (7) MN: Naxeir moxalef mard. (8) LC: Mard ki komak bache? (9) MN: Naxeir. Naxeir, moxalef mard. (10) LC: Nou mard. (11) MN: Nou mard. Bache zan raftan moxalef kardan nou mard ki dashtan bishtar zar u ki bashad kashang. Hala bache zan u nou mard raftan dashtan bache. (12) LC: Tekrar kardan. (13) MN: Nou mard u bache mard bache zan raftan dashtan bache. Mard. . .nou mard u bache zan raftan busidan likin nou zan..Nou zan bache zan (14) LC: (interupts) Moxalef bache zan? (15) MN: Bale. (16) LC: Bache zan u moxalef mard dashtan nou bache zan. (17) MN: Bale. OK chiz harf zadan ba nou zan. (18) LC: Chiz? (19) MN: Ki harf zadan bow-wow. (20) LC: Bale. (21) MN: Chiz harf zadan ba nou zan, bache zan...harf....Chiz harf zadan shoma bache zan raftan...naxeir raftan moxalef kardan...moloxat kardan...Chiz harf zadan ba nou zan shoma bache zan naxeir mo..moloxat kardan nou mard ki bashad zar ki bashad kashang. Hala nou zan bashad xazabnak nou zan harf zadan ba Chiz shoma naxeir dorost. Hala... Hala bache zan ki bashad az mahal ki dashtan daraxt u kohne mard daxel shodan kanah. U bache zan dashtan bishtar felezz.



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English Gloss (1) MN: When the old man sees the girl, the old man is happy. To the house, the new woman eats/drinks and makes bread and fruit. The new woman has a thing that’s alive, the thing says bow-wow (barks), the thing is soft (has fur), has four legs. The thing can talk, and it says the old man’s girl (her step-daughter) is going to be rich. (2) LC: The thing talks to the old man? (3) MN: No, the thing talks to the new woman. The old man is in the place with the trees ( forest). OK. the thing says, the girl is going to be rich. (4) LC: Have what? (5) MN: Have more money (be rich). And the girl is going to be pretty and the girl is going to meet a rich man who is hansom and the man and the girl (6) LC: (interrupts) The man who lives in the house is going to be rich? (7) MN: No, a different man. (8) LC: The man who helps the girl? (9) MN: No. No, a different man. (10) LC: A new man. (11) MN: A new man. The girl is going to meet a new man who is rich and who is handsome. The girl and the new man are going to have a child. (12) LC: Repeat. (13) MN: The new man and child man (self-corrects) girl are going to have a child. The Man (self-corrects without a pause) the new man and the girl are going to kiss, but a new woman (repeats without a pause) a new girl. (14) LC: (interrupts) Different girl? (15) MN: Yes. (16) LC: The new woman and the different man have a new girl. (17) MN: Yes. OK, The thing talks to the new woman. (18) LC: The thing?


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(19) MN: The thing that says bow-wow. (20) LC: Yes. (21) MN: The thing says to the new woman, the girl (self-corrects), sa (self-interrupts), the things says, your girl is going (self-corrects), is not going different do (self-corrects) meet (restarts). The thing says to the new woman, your daughter won’t meet a new man who is rich, who is handsome. The new woman is angry; she says to the thing, you are not right. The girl who was at the place with trees (forest) and the old man enter the house. And the girl has coins. Narrative 2 – LC Time 2 (This is a story called “Mr. Koumal flies”. The passage below is from the beginning of the story). (1) LC: Anja bashad yek mard. Mard bola raftan bozorg...tude...tude zamin. Mard bola raftan tude u didan parande. Parande parvz kardan u mard xastan parvaz kardan. Mard jastan u harakat kardan tan likin naxeir parvaz kardan. Hala parande didan mard u par...u...xadr tekke...parande dashtan tekke tekke kardan parande parvaz kardan. (2) MN: Tekrar kardan. (3) LC: Tekke dashtan...parande dashtan tekke. Tekke (4) MN: Dashtan? (5) LC: Dashtan. Dashtan tekke. (6) MN: Xadr tekke? (7) LC: Bale. Parande didan mard u xadr tekke...xadr tekke az parande zadan zamin. Mard...mard gozashtan tekke ruje tan u bola raftan tude. Hala mard jastan u harakat kardan tan likin mard zadan zamin. (8) MN: Zadan zamin? (9) LC: Bale. Parande didan mard u hala have...hame...hame tekke xadr zamin. Mard gozashtan tekke ruje tan u bola raftan tude u jastan u harakat kardan tan likin mard zamin...zadan zamin. Hala mard rahraftan ba kanah ku juje zende. (10) MN: Juje? Bale. (11) LC: Mard gozasehtan hamin...hame tekke baz juje ruje.



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(12) MN: Baz juje? Az (13) LC: Az juje ruje tan. Hala mard bola raftan tude u jastan u harakat kardan likin mard zadan zamin. Mard...mard kashidan...shekastan...mard kashidan u hala mard dashtan kanah zan...zan daxel shodan kanah u didan...didan mard toxme morx az juje. (14) MN: Dadan ba mard toxme morx? (15) LC: Bale mard xastan...mard xastan bozorg shodan (16) MN: Bozorg shodan (17) LC: Mard xastan bozorg shodan juje. (18) MN: Mard xastan bozorg shodan? (19) LC: Bale u mard xastan gozashtan hame tekke az juje sur...ruje tan. Mard parvaz kardan.

English Gloss (1) LC: There’s a man. The man climbs a big (pause) pile (pause), pile of earth. The man climbs the pile and sees a bird. The bird is flying and the man wants to fly. The man jumps and moves his body (flaps his arms), but doesn’t fly. The bird sees the man, and the birr (selfinterruption), and (pause), pieces – (restart) the bird has piece that make the bird fly. (2) MN: Repeat. (3) LC: Pieces have – (restart) The bird has pieces. Pieces (4) MN: Has? (5) LC: Has. Has pieces. (6) MN: Pieces? (making the plural explicit) (7) LC: Yes. he bird sees the man and pieces (pause) pieces from the bird hit the ground. The man (pause), the man puts the pieces on his body and climbs the pile. The man jumps and moves his body. (8) MN: Hits the ground? (9) LC: Yes. The bird sees the man and pieces hit the ground. The man puts the pieces on his body and climbs the pile and jumps and moves


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his body, but the man ground (self-correction) hits the ground. The man walks to the house where chickens live. (10) MN: Chickens? ohh. (signaling understanding) (11) LC: The man puts same (self-correction) pieces open chicken on (12) MN: Open chicken??? From? (13) LC: From chicken on his body. Then the man climbs the pile and jumps and moves his body, but the man hits the ground. The man (pause), the man suffers (said with rising intonation), breaks (said with rising intonation). (Restart) The man suffers and has a bed leg. (He hurts himself and breaks his leg). Then the man goes in his house the woman, the woman enters the house and sees (pause) sees the man an egg from a chicken. (14) MN: Gives the man an egg? (15) LC: Yes. The man wants to grow a chicken. (16) MN: Grow? (17) LC: The man wants to grow a chicken. (18) MN: The man wants to grow? (19) LC: Yes, and the man wants to put the pieces from the chicken sur, (self-correction) on his. The man wants to fly.

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