An embattled scholar still champions his dream experiment in language formation
In 1976 the linguist Derek Bickerton was visited in Hawaii by a kindred spirit, Talmy (Tom) Givón, a professor at UCLA. Neither was particularly taken with the pleasantries of academe, and they bonded over their outré status. Givón, an Israeli expat who had fought in the Suez War, in 1956, once advertised his antagonism to the academy by showing up at a linguistics conference garbed in a poncho and sombrero, with a Winchester rifle in his pickup truck. Bickerton had backed his way into the discipline after working at a string of other professions, landing at the University of Guyana, and being immediately fascinated by the varieties of creole English he found there.
As this pair of soi-disant renegades smoked pot while soaking up the bucolic otherworldliness of Lanai’s Mount Lanaihale, they talked about Bickerton’s theories of creole languages, particularly his idea that their genesis — a long-contested issue within linguistics — provided a privileged view on the essential, innate program of how basic mental structures work, an empirical justification for Noam Chomsky’s notions of universal grammar. Indeed, if one could somehow create a creole, a language that develops when speakers of multiple languages remain in contact with one another, it might just prove the existence of such mental structures. In this unlikely open-air seminar room, far above Lanai’s fragrant pineapple fields, Bickerton and Givón cooked up an experiment that is probably the most notorious in the history of modern linguistics.
The proposed desert-island experiment, as it became known in linguistic lore (somewhat misleadingly — it was actually planned for a small western-Pacific atoll named Ngemelis, in the Palau islands), comprised a three-year set of projects, the middle 12 months of which entailed having six sets of parents, each hailing from an unrelated language family, live and work together without exposure to any secondary tongue. Each pair would be accompanied by their 2-year-old child, who at that age would be just on the cusp at which kids effortlessly acquire their first language. During the initial year of the experiment, Bickerton and his research staff were to have taught the 12 adults a basic set of around 200 English vocabulary words, like “head” and “fish.” The third year would be taken up with analyzing the data that resulted from these extreme conditions. And the second, crucial year would be the crux of the experiment — when the couples and their kids would gut it out in this crazy, linguistically unstable (and physically demanding) environment.
If the research protocol sounds today like a reality-TV show run amok, the proposal was all the more astonishing in the pre-Survivor days. Remarkably, and to his surprise, as Bickerton recalls in his recently published memoir, Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowliest Languages (Hill and Wang), the plan got a green light from the University of Hawaii’s Committee on Human Experimentation. So in 1977 he sent off his proposal to the National Science Foundation; a few months later, he learned that an NSF panel had approved the project, with one caveat. An advisory board consisting of six experts from psychology, anthropology, and isolation studies would have to be drawn up before the foundation would sign off on the project, which Bickerton was told was a “mere formality.” It looked as though he would soon embark on a project that he envisioned would unlock the secrets not only of how creole languages are born but also of how language per se comes into being.
Bickerton’s theories about creole languages have been no less controversial than his desert-atoll proposal. The subfield of creole linguistics is a relatively youthful one, and Bickerton, 82, now emeritus at Hawaii, has lived through its birth, adolescence, and maturity over the past four decades. But the idea that languages like Haitian French and Guyanese creole represent a curious and somehow unique linguistic phenomenon has been around for the past two centuries. The generally accepted account has been formulated around the initial contact and intense interaction of groups of speakers representing more than two unrelated (or only distantly related) languages. Such a sociolinguistic environment is ripe for the emergence of a pidgin — a common language, as syntactically stripped down as a birch in winter — to facilitate basic communication among speakers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to understand one another. It is no coincidence that the creoles most frequently studied emerged amid the horrors of Caribbean sugar plantations, when the massive importation of slaves, speaking many African languages, found themselves under the linguistic control of overlords speaking English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch.
It is from the development of a working pidgin that creole languages emerge, as children who are at the age of language acquisition play among themselves, are exposed to the pidgin, and learn it as their first language. The macaronic, or mishmash, pidgin has an epiphenomenal vocabulary (it’s been called a “word salad”) drawn from the contact languages and based, in Bickerton’s account, on the elegantly willy-nilly, catch-as-catch-can logic endemic to any language. What the children who were exposed to this macaronic pidgin developed from scratch were brand-new syntactic structures.
In Bastard Tongues, he gives as an example the Guyanese creole sentence “Look a red man a piss a road corner.” Although the words seem familiarly English, for the most part, he glosses the sentence as “Look, that white guy is taking a leak on the side of the road.” The first “a” in the passage is a definite article, probably derived from “that”; the second “a” is marker of aspect, indicating continuing action; the third “a” is a preposition akin to “on.” “Road corner,” Bickerton writes, is a wonderful euphemism made concrete as a noun phrase indicating “the side of the road.” How did “road corner” come to mean its opposite? He writes: “In the oldest form of Guyanese, ‘wissaid,’ derived from ‘which side,’ was the chosen form for [a question marker in speech, like “where”]. That meant that ‘side’ could thereafter mean ‘place’ and only ‘place’ and therefore could no longer mean ‘side.’ But something meaning ‘side’ still had to be said, so they co-opted ‘corner’; ‘a road corner’ now means ‘by the side of the road.’”
The lexicography of creoles is quite a bit of fun to think about — and Bickerton writes appealingly about his immersion into trying to figure out the initially baffling phrases scavenged from the various languages that contributed to the creoles he worked on. But much more important to him was what was happening syntactically. He began to see formal similarities among vastly different creoles. Whether they emerged in the fort environments of the Indian Ocean or the plantation conditions of Guyana, Haiti, and Suriname, they bore to his mind formal resemblances that he believed could not be accounted for by the influences or lingering presence of either native African or colonial languages. The grammatical categories of tense and aspect, he reasoned, seemed to work similarly in all creoles, regardless of what formal categories had existed in the original contact languages. The macaronic recruitment of words from the various languages in contact may have blunted how similar these systems were; nonetheless, for all intents and purposes, they seemed weirdly, interestingly equivalent. Could it be possible that creole syntactic structures offered an on-the-ground glimpse of what was most fundamental in language? Bickerton rolled the dice in his research proposal, thinking, against the odds, that that might be so. Initially at least, he threw a seven.
Bickerton’s theoretical understanding of creole languages was undergirded by an understanding of them as “exceptionalist.” These were liminal languages, borderline even when it came to their status as a “language.” In that sense, they were like the peculiar languages spoken by wild children who, in classical European tales, had grown up orphaned in the wilderness, and who had learned to speak only at age 12 after being raised by wolves. Such languages don’t don the fancy clothes of English or Latin or German or Sanskrit, but are somehow closer to the naked structures of early language as our ancestors took the babbling baby steps of nascent communication. As such, they offered a privileged window on how language came into being, a vantage point that had long disappeared with most languages.
When I asked Michel DeGraff, who specializes in creole linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and who himself is a native speaker of Haitian French), what he thought about Bickerton’s memoir, he was a bit nonplussed. He wrote by e-mail: “Bickerton is ‘blazing trails’ in his own imagined community of scholars. He keeps repeating the old dogma that ‘creoles spring pure and clear from the very fountain of language, and their emergence, through all the horrors of slavery, represents a triumph of all that’s strongest and most enduring in the human spirit’ and (as if that were a compliment) that the ‘convoluted recesses [of noncreole languages] facilitate lying and deceit.’” According to DeGraff, who squared off against Bickerton in 2004 in Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, over the extent to which creole languages offered an “exceptionalist” paradigm for understanding how language emerges, Bickerton invokes a Rousseauvian myth of noble savages, of primitivism posed against the debauched and overly self-consciously codified speech of civilized men.
I asked Bickerton what he thought of that takedown, and he wrote back via e-mail: “It’s nonsense to claim that I ‘invoke Rousseauvian myths’ and so forth. This is just a rhetorical smoke screen to cover the weakness in DeGraff’s own position.” He continued: “All I do is set forth the only possible explanation for why creole languages are as similar to one another as they are: that they are using what DeGraff, as an MIT man, might be happier to call the default parameter settings of universal grammar. Nothing DeGraff has ever written has even tried to explain these similarities, yet since the 1880s they have been recognized as the most salient feature of creole languages.” The question, though, of whether Bickerton’s work is indeed trailblazing or a capitulation to 19th-century assumptions about what creole languages represented is one that can’t be separated, ultimately, from his research, or from the way his work is received. The question itself is polarizing.
The anthropological linguist Michael Silverstein, of the University of Chicago, dismissed Bickerton’s “bioprogrammatic” ideas by calling him the “P.T. Barnum of linguistics,” and DeGraff scoffed at the notion that Bickerton’s ideas were even original: “Bickerton’s idea that, among all of the world’s languages, creoles are closest to the evolutionary roots of human language is not at all new. The basic idea was already published in 1872 by Auguste de Saint-Quentin, a 19th-century amateur linguist in Guyana who wrote that creole grammar is ‘a spontaneous product of the human mind, freed from any kind of intellectual culture.’ Intoxicated by his studies, he wrote of its ‘rigor and simplicity’ such that ‘one wonders if the creative genius of the most knowledgeable linguists would have been able to give birth to anything that so completely reaches its goal, that imposes so little strain on memory and that calls for so little effort from those with limited intelligence.’”
Just after his proposal for the atoll experiment had seemingly been accepted by the National Science Foundation, Bickerton started to hear negative responses to the proposed experiment. John Lynch, for example, a professor of language in Papua New Guinea, had this to say: “The project is unethical, racist, and exploitative, particularly given the fact that the subjects are to be from areas with little or no contact with the Western world. … One staff member summed it up very succinctly: The Pacific is not a cultural zoo.” Still, as Bickerton writes in Bastard Tongues, he expected after the fait-accompli note from the NSF that the sailing would be smooth.
He was mistaken. The NSF’s flags turned red, and as the advisory board met with Bickerton in Colorado, layer after layer of the experiment met with serious objections and reservations. Ward Goodenough, an anthropologist who specialized in Polynesian cultures and is now a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, became the most critical member of the committee. “At first I was quite enthusiastic about the idea,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “My wife was with me at our second meeting, and she pointed out to me some things that made me reconsider the whole business. The thesis was a recipe for serious trouble.” Goodenough called Bickerton “an interesting man, full of ideas,” but said the idea of graduate students’ overseeing human subjects in such a difficult and arduous experiment was dangerous. “You could see it would blow up in their faces. They had no sensitivity to the human aspects of it.” When Goodenough argued his position in front of the committee, he quickly persuaded it to recommend that the NSF turn down the experiment as originally proposed.
By the time the advisory committee was done, Bickerton saw his Defoe-like foray into the roots of language in tatters: Rather than the Asians and rural Pacific Islanders he saw as research subjects, the board required subjects from developed countries. No children would be involved. The experiment could last no longer than three months, and it had to take place in the continental United States. Facing those restrictions, Bickerton writes, “Tom and I came independently to the same conclusion: Screw it.” He wrote a novel (about a man who sheds his humanity to speak with dolphins) to make up for the lost income the NSF would have provided, and he resigned himself to the fact that his experiment was unlikely ever to see the sunlight. Much of Bastard Tongues is given bitterly over to his barely suppressed anger that what he sees as a groundbreaking social work of scientific research was torpedoed by the politically correct, paternalistic, child-coddling bias of his peers.
Suspending judgment about the ethical concerns of this linguistic approximation of Biosphere 2, what might Bickerton’s proposed experiment have yielded? He thinks that we might have masses of data to sift through — raw information delivered up pristinely, about everything from the creation of pidgins to the sociolinguistic parameters of hierarchy, information that the discipline rarely has access to. Others are doubtful even about that. In a phone interview, Silverstein characterizes the desert-atoll petri dish as an “ancient one — to see what language, if any, springs from nothing,” but he believes it was a flawed attempt to map a purely theoretical idealization onto a set of empirical circumstances. “Chomsky’s notion of the emergence of language ex niholo,” Silverstein says, “is based on instantaneous learning; Bickerton was committing the fallacy of trying to calibrate an idealization within a real-life situation.” Crucially, isolating language from a set of social dynamics is impossible, he says: “Bickerton’s notion of communication is a very impoverished one. It took absolutely nothing into account of the nature of social action (asymmetry, dominance, etc.).” For most anthropological linguists, unembedding language from its social and cultural context, and studying it in isolation, is simply a misrepresentation of what language ultimately is.
DeGraff says that “the sociolinguistic profiles of Caribbean colonies at the time of creole formation were not at all similar to that of the ‘desert islands’ Bickerton’s dreamed of for his experiment. Any result from the latter would have little to say about the emergence of creole languages. What we’ve learned from linguists and historians who are better informed of the socioeconomic history of the Caribbean is that when Haitian creole, say, was taking shape, the Africans and their descendants in Saint-Domingue (that is, colonial Haiti) had much greater exposure to French and their ancestral languages than Bickerton’s conjecture would permit.” Much of Bickerton’s thinking, DeGraff says, is based on a false sense of a blackboard-erasing moment attendant to the conditions of slavery, a moment when linguistic anarchy reigned. “The fact that many Africans in the colonial Caribbean, especially those in daily contact with the European colonists, could speak full-fledged varieties of European languages has been richly documented — in first-hand colonial reports,” he notes. “We learn from them that there were Africans in Saint-Domingue who were quite fluent in French, so fluent that they were deemed capable of teaching French to some of the French-born illiterate patois speakers who came to the colony from far-flung provinces.”
Bickerton argues for the “exceptionalism” of creole languages by citing peculiar syntactic phenomena like serial verbs, which are absent in the languages in contact. Still, DeGraff argues that the sociohistorical facts of, say, Haitian creole are consistent with the linguistic evidence. “In Bickerton’s scenario, the grammatical structures of creole languages are created almost exclusively by some innate ‘language bioprogram.’ For him, this has to be so because the linguistic input — actually, the ‘linguistic scraps’ available — to the first creole speakers came almost exclusively from a pidgin. The latter, for Bickerton, is virtually a linguistic tabula rasa, with little structure, if any; thus the ‘scraps.’”
“In such a scenario,” DeGraff continues, “we would expect that a creole language such as Haitian creole would have created its grammatical structures and word stock, including its affixes [the additions to the front and back of words, like "-ed” or "-s” in English, that signify tense or plurality or aspect], from mostly the precedent pidgin’s linguistic scraps, with almost no structures retained from the varieties of French and African languages spoken in colonial Haiti. Yet the linguistic evidence cries out loud and clear to the contrary: For example, it is well documented that there are quite a few syntactic patterns in Haitian creole that are derived from the ancestral African languages, and by and large the lexical materials of Haitian creole, including most of its prefixes and suffixes, have been selected from French. This is particularly striking in the case of affixes which are claimed, in Bickerton’s scenario, to be virtually nonexistent in the pidgin. In this scenario, the presence of French-derived affixes in Haitian creole would be a complete mystery, as they would not have been available in the impoverished pidgin that putatively preceded it.”
Regardless of such criticisms, Bickerton ends Bastard Tongues by proposing the desert-island experiment again, in a new setting: among South American orphans, or even in a large American city, among recent immigrants in a day-care-center-cum-language-lab. He still believes that performing the experiment is necessary for understanding the origins of creoles: “You pays your money and you takes your choice, as the amusement-stall barkers used to say in the old country,” he writes. “Either way, the results would tell us something about the human brain that we couldn’t learn any other way.” This time, though, he argues that anybody willing to execute the experiment should bypass federal support and go straight to someone in the private sector. If television executives can put on Kid Nation, placing children in a survival-of-the-fittest contest in a ghost town, maybe it’s not such a reach.
Eric Banks, a former editor of Bookforum, is a writer in New York.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 37, Page B7