Hello Pole,
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "grammar"?
I mean the underlying set of rules that allows speakers to parse, create, and understand sentences.
And you shouldn't forget that the creol is considerably dependent on the pidgin that gave rise to it. So there is a lot of liguistic determinism involved even in those cases.
It is, but the point is that creoles invariably contain grammatical constructs that are entirely absent from the parent pidgin. The constructs are created by children who grow up speaking the pidgin but who require more precise modes of communication than allowed by the current system. The new features ostensibly come from an inborn "universal grammar." Pinker notes that the types of mistakes children make when learning language are often very similar across linguistic boundaries, suggesting that children expect language to work a certain way and have to override those expections in some cases.
I'm familiar with the theory of the Language Acquisition Device. One of the strongest supports of this is that children seem to know things about language despite "poverty of input." As an example, Paul Kiparsky noticed an interesting rule in English: suffixes can be attached to an irregular plural noun, but not a regular plural noun. For example, we can say a house is "mice-infested" (plural mice), but never "rats-infested." In the case of the rat, we must say it is "rat-infested," even though, as Pinker notes, one rat does not make an infestation.
In an experiment to see if children were aware of this rule, linguists showed children pictures of a monster and gave a sentence like this: "Here is a monster who likes to eat mud. He is a...mud-eater." Then they went on to describe other diets to the children and ask the children to say what kind of monster it was. So the next question might be, "This monster likes to eat rats. He is a...." And the children would correctly answer "rat-eater," not "rats-eater." Even children who mistakenly used the plural "mouses" never called the monster a "mouses-eater." But the really interesting thing was when the linguists studied the language such children were exposed to and found that there was little, if any, examples that would lead a child to that rule. So this may be one aspect of the Universal Grammar that is part of a Language Acquisition Device. Once the right switches have been flipped, the child suddenly has a lot of knowledge about his or her language.
Ahhh. Language is never born from thin air. There must be some stimulation and interaction before the clinically established "critical period" (between 6 and 12).
Actually, in this case, it truly was language from nothing. Here's how it worked. In 1979 a new government was formed in Nicaragua and it set up schools for the deaf. Until that time, the deaf had lived isolated from one another so this was the first time that this particular group of children had ever gotten together with other deaf children. At the time, there was no sign language in Nicaragua, but on the playgrounds, the children began communicating with each other by using gestures and pantomimes. This gave rise to a sort of sign pigdin. However, the next generation that came in, aged around four, observed this pidgin and formed new grammatical devices that have become standardized. Pinker says:
Their signing is more fluid and compact, and the gestures are more stylized and less like a pantomime....[The language] has spontaneously standardized itself; all the young children sign it in the same way. The children have introduced many grammatical devices that were absent in LSN [the pidgin], and hence rely less on circumlocutions....[The language contains a device that is] formally identical to inflecting a verb for agreement in spoken languages.
Thus, the language came to exist because of the human desire for the ability to express oneself clearly and precisely, not the other way around. Humans will language into being. The existence of language does not allow us to think; the ability to think causes us to create the means of expression that adequately transmit those thoughts. I certainly agree that having language allows us to formalize and order our thoughts in a way we would have trouble doing without. But the point is that that very desire to order and transmit our thoughts precisely causes us to create language.
That's why I said that a group of language-less adults dropped onto an isolated island would regain language in a few generations. The adults would first form a roughshod pidgin among themselves. Then, their children would hone it into a standardized creole. The grandchildren would harden and flush it out ever more. Voila! New language.
SNG
