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Topic: Derek Bickerton

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	SRB Editorial 3(2)
		Bickerton is best known for his controversial work in pidgin-creole studies, particularly Roots of Language (1981) in which he advances the hypothesis that human children are biologically programmed to create real languages (creoles) in social contexts where they are exposed only to pidgin, a code that he considers pregrammatical.
		Bickerton suggests that the emergence of a unique, omnipotent and omniscient species such as ourselves is the inevitable result of teleological processes of evolution.
		Bickerton illustrates the distinction between protolanguage and language with a telling comparison of utterances recorded from a child in the process of acquiring language with utterances recorded from a chimpanzee in the most advanced stages of its training in ASL.
	www.chass.utoronto.ca /epc/srb/srb/protolang.html (3511 words)

	Derek Bickerton
		Bickerton, D. (2003) Symbol and structure: a comprehensive framework for language evolution.
		Bickerton, D. (2002) Foraging Versus Social Intelligence in the Evolution of Protolanguage.
		Bickerton, D. (1998) Catastrophic evolution: The case for a single step from protolanguage to full human language.
	www.isrl.uiuc.edu /~amag/langev/author/dbickerton.html (122 words)

	[No title]
		Bickerton is convinced that the principles are innate, and puts forward his study of Hawaiian Creole as well as certain characteristics of all creoles as evidence.
		Bickerton uses these differences as evidence that the substratum languages did not influence the creoles, and that the children obey the LBH even when it goes against the target language.
		Bickerton articulates his bias in the conclusion that his and Chomsky's approach is in response to behaviorism, learning theory and empirical philosophy.
	labweb.education.wisc.edu /edpsy725/documents/chemp.html (2232 words)

	LHB Opinion Text
		Bickerton argues (based on creole language behavior) (p36) that the "default" situation for relative clauses is that they are not explicitly marked by a relative pronoun or "that".
		Bickerton makes an interesting and somewhat extreme claim that any complex planning must be based on a syntactic faculty, even in the case of Churchland's hypothetical deaf-mute (p 108, bottom), where there has been no opportunity to develop the external, communicative aspects of language.
		Bickerton is the first, in my reading, to actually keep two complete rep. systems, one with memory inputs, one without.
	www.lloydrice.com /LHBopi.htm (876 words)

	Derek Bickerton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Derek Bickerton (born March 25, 1926) is a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.
		Derek Bickerton entered academic life in the 1960s, first as a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and then, after a year's postgraduate work in linguistics at the University of Leeds, as Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Guyana (1967-71).
		For twenty-four years he was a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii, having meanwhile received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Cambridge (1976).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Derek_Bickerton (370 words)

	"Bickerton review"
		Bickerton writes, the only means of expressing simple ideas would have been the kind of crude protolanguage babbled by infants or laboriously employed by chimps trained to use hand signs and computer keyboards to demand bananas.
		Bickerton, a professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, believes it was chatter like this that fueled the rapid expansion of the human brain, providing not only a rudimentary tool for communication but a burgeoning cerebral work space for hammering together simple thoughts about the world.
		Bickerton supposes that late in human development, with the brain at its full size and the vague thoughts allowed by protolanguage sloshing around inside, a single random mutation unleashed a reorganization of the cerebral tissue.
	www.santafe.edu /~johnson/reviews.bickerton.html (795 words)

	coconuts
		Bickerton, for example, has never suggested that being born with a creolelike bioprogram means we should all speak creole.
		Bickerton now believes, for example, that the bioprogram does not specifically mandate that every child use adjectives as verbs, saying things like "I flatted the box." Rather, it might endow the child with a concept of "caused by someone," and the child will look for grammar to express that.
		Bickerton maintains he was putting forward "a hypothesis, not a theory." Yet he admits it was a bold one.
	faculty.ed.umuc.edu /~jmatthew/articles/coconuts.html (4551 words)

	Derek Bickerton, emeritus professor of linguisitcs at the University of Hawaii (Honolulu, USA) · Forum 2004
		British professor, Derek Bickerton, explained that, in the origins of humanity, the first language that was probably used by human beings was based on signs, although, unfortunately "the origin of languages did not leave any archeological remains."
		Bickerton advocated for a language used for international communication that, nonetheless, still doesn't exist with full guarantees of respect towards the other languages.
		Derek Bickerton, is an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii (Honolulu, USA).
	www.barcelona2004.org /eng/actualidad/noticias/html/f043615.htm (537 words)

	Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics Summer Conference 2003
		In modern efforts to answer the Two Questions, Derek Bickerton has been creole studies’ most prominent scholar and the LBH the pivotal concept, from its initial formulations in the 1974 Working Papers in Linguistics article through Roots of Language to the 1984 formulation and ultimately the 1988 reformulation.
		However, what Bickerton did in the LBH that had not been done before—and this remains his central contribution to the field—was to locate his answer in the architecture of the brain rather than in, for example, the social circumstances in which creole genesis took place.
		Thus, even though Bickerton has argued that it is not the social setting of creole genesis that makes creole languages what they are, he has had to posit a particular social setting for them that apparently holds only for them.
	www.hawaii.edu /spcl03/abstracts-colloquium.htm (949 words)

	Amazon.de: Lingua Ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain (Bradford Books (Hardcover)): English ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Neurophysiologist William Calvin and linguist Derek Bickerton observe in this lively book, language is probably not a deus ex machina invention, something "tacked onto an ape brain"; instead, it evolved, along with the brain, to accommodate an ever more complex social calculus.
		Bickerton writes that "it's words, not sentences, that dramatically distinguish our species from others," while Calvin takes a more pointed interest in neural adaptations that allowed for "structured language," that is, long statements with embedded clauses and phrases.
		Bickerton writes that "it's words, not sentences, that dramatically distinguish our species from others," while Calvin takes a more pointed interest in neural adaptations that allowed for "structured language"--that is, long statements with embedded clauses and phrases.
	www.amazon.de /Lingua-Ex-Machina-Reconciling-Hardcover/dp/0262032732 (905 words)

	William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina (MIT Press, 2000)
		Derek Bickerton is a linguist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, author of Language and Species and Language and Human Behavior, whose work showing how children convert a pidgin into a creole is part of the evidence for an innate predisposition to particular grammars.
		Derek Bickerton is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawai'i in Honolulu.
		He has studied the evolution of language for two decades and one of his major concerns is to resolve the apparent conflict between formal, nativist accounts of universal grammar and the evidence from paleoanthropology and neurology.
	williamcalvin.com /LEM (5163 words)

	Book review of Derek Bickerton (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Bickerton believes that language is the key to the success of the human species, the one feature that made us so much more powerful than all other species.
		Bickerton thinks that human and animal communication are completely different phenomena.
		In fact, Bickerton believes that human language is not primarily a means to communicate but a means to represent the world.
	www.thymos.com /mind/bickerto.html (380 words)

	[No title]
		This enables us to derive principles of language not from uniquely task-specific processes, but from general brain processes inescapable in any kind of sentence-building, such as the relative order in which constituents must be attached to one another, or the determination of boundaries between sub-units of the sentence (phrases, clauses).
		Preliminary investigations (Bickerton and Calvin 2000, Appendix; Bickerton, ms.) suggest that the wealth of data produced by four decades of generative studies may indeed be explicable in these terms.
		Bickerton, D. & Calvin, W.A. Lingua ex Machina.
	www.ling.ed.ac.uk /evolang2002/ABSTRACTS/bickerton.doc (481 words)

	CONSCIOUSNESS, COMMUNICATION, LANGUAGE
		Bickerton 1981, 1984, 1990, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1999; Calvin, Bickerton 2000.
		the syntax of "language" in Bickerton's (1999) sense) is connected with the conditions that favoured an increasing relative influence of arbitrariness to the disadvantage of iconicity (cf.
		Bickerton, Derek (1994), "Origin and evolution of language", in: Asher (ed.) (1994), 2881-3.
	www.trismegistos.com /IconicityInLanguage/Articles/Koch/Koch.htm (9371 words)

	Citations: Language and Species - Bickerton (ResearchIndex)
		The Acquisition of Grammar in an Evolving Population of Language..
		Bickerton, Derek, 1990 Language and Species, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
		Protolanguage, for Bickerton, was not blessed with the syntactic intricacies of modern languages, but onlyhad very simple devices for stringing words together.
	citeseer.ist.psu.edu /context/3335/0 (1642 words)

	DARWINISM-WATCH.com - Responding Evolutionist Propaganda in the Media
		Evolutionist Derek Bickerton, professor of philology at Hawaii University, admits the impossibility of language’s evolution in the face of the syntax’s complexity with the following words:
		(Derek Bickerton, Language and Species, The University of Chicago Press, 1992, p.190) (The term “beneficial mutation” in this quotation is an expression of the author’s biased evolutionist views.
		Bickerton’s words are sufficient by themselves to negate the evolution theory by the fact of the faculty of speech humankind possesses.
	www.darwinism-watch.com /nat_geo_030411.php (797 words)

	The New York Review of Books: ROOTS OF CREOLE
		Bickerton has always told a good tale, whether as journalist or novelist, but such skill can sometimes serve mainly to dazzle.
		Bickerton attempts to prove that the creoles' similarities resulted from language universals rather than from the influence of earlier "substrate" languages by citing the case of Hawaiian Creole English and stating flatly (p.
		Bickerton's credibility is further marred by his manipulation of facts that run counter to his argument and by his frequent factual errors.
	www.nybooks.com /articles/6483 (879 words)

	From Grunting to Grammar
		In ''Lingua ex Machina'' William H. Calvin, a theoretical neurophysiologist, and Derek Bickerton, a linguist known for his work on creole languages, see themselves as bringing both fields to their senses.
		Calvin and Bickerton are dismissive, arguing that words can't be all that important since some apes trained extensively by humans have developed some symbolic skills.
		Calvin and Bickerton talk about evolution of language as if they were recounting a long and messy battle in the War of 1812.
	partners.nytimes.com /books/00/04/16/reviews/000416.16bloomt.html (1027 words)

	Language Log: A new idea about the evolution of language
		Derek's theory is that it's all about cutting up dead elephants.
		One of the advantages of the coconut-size brain is that it holds primary representations (Bickerton 1990) of a very broad range of organisms and entities, including all the species with which the individual habitually interacts.
		Now Derek Bickerton argues that it's because efficiently cutting up dead elephants required "some way to express, compare and evaluate" the opportunities found by different scouting parties.
	itre.cis.upenn.edu /~myl/languagelog/archives/002239.html (1373 words)

	Bickerton & Calvin: Lingua Ex Machina
		In a lively back-and-forth across disciplines, Calvin and Bickerton wrestle language to the mat in a way no single author could.
		The result is something halfway between a synthesis and a dialogue, that leads the reader on a challenging ride through some of the most interesting and controversial topics in the science of mind.
		Derek Bickerton is an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Hawai'i in Honolulu.
	cogweb.ucla.edu /Abstracts/Calvin_98.html (1625 words)

	Book review of William Calvin
		Bickerton believes that syntax is what makes our species unique: other species can also "symbolize", but none has showed a hint of grammar.
		Bickerton travels back to the origins of hominids, to the hostile savannas where hominids were easy targets for predators and had precious little food sources.
		In his quest for the very first utterances, Bickerton speculates that language was born to label things, then evolved to qualify those labels in the present situation: "leopard footprints" and "danger" somehow need to be combined to yield the meaning "when you see leopard footprints, be careful".
	www.thymos.com /mind/calvin3.html (809 words)

	langspecies
		Bickerton, since the language bioprogram is both genetically determined and identical in all
		As a prelude to the narrative, Bickerton contrasts the structure of language with that of
		Bickerton suggests that both protolanguage and language are evidence of secondary
	faculty.ed.umuc.edu /~jmatthew/articles/langspecies.html (3534 words)

	Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics Summer Conference 2003
		For instance, claims that creoles developed gradually over several generations (Carden and Stewart 1989, Arends 1988) were shown to be groundless based on the authors' own data (Bickerton 1991).
		Claims by Lefebvre and Lumsden (1989) and others that there were insufficient children in creole colonies to start a creole were shown to be false in Bickerton (1990a) on the basis of contemporary census records.
		Claims that the serial verb constructions in Seselwa described in Bickerton (1988) were not real serials, made by Seuren (1990) and Corne et al.
	www.hawaii.edu /spcl03/abstracts-plenary.htm (1148 words)

	Citations: Roots of Language - Derek (ResearchIndex)
		Bickerton, Derek (1981) Roots of Language, Karoma, Ann Arbor.
		The evidence for this comes from the lack of a consistent grammatical relationship between the creole and these potential sources, as well as the similarities of unrelated creoles....
		Bickerton, Derek, (1981) Roots of Language, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma Publishers.
	citeseer.ist.psu.edu /context/163976/0 (826 words)

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