Creolization, Lang Change, and Lang Acquisition

[Michel DeGraff]

RE message from karlib at mail.dmh.state.mo.us on Fri, 16 Jul 1999 13:11:00 -0500:

> I am forwarding this message from the Linguist list but only because I have
> a question about it.  Among the contributors are several people who work in
> sign language linguistics.  The question:  Does anyone know how research
> into signed languages figures in the book?  Is it a significant section?

Thank you for your interested in this volume which I edited.  To answer
your questions: Research on sign languages does figure prominently and
significantly.  Count-wise, there are roughly 90 pages devoted to sign
languages, including chapters by Elissa Newport and by Judy Kegl, Ann
Senghas and Marie Coppola and various passages of commentary by David
Lightfoot and by myself.  Conceptually, the sign-language chapters are key
to the goals of the volume: sign-language acquisition is used as sources of
insights toward understanding the mental bases for _Language Creation &
Language Change_.  The sign-language chapters focus on how individual
mental processes underlying acquisition interact with external factors that
affect the Primary Linguistic Data.  Perhaps the best thing to do is to
just quote below a few relevant passages from my introduction chapter.
Hope you find them useful.  Thanks again for your interest, -michel.

LANGUAGE CREATION AND LANGUAGE CHANGE:
CREOLIZATION, DIACHRONY, AND DEVELOPMENT
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/DEGLHF98

p13:

 "In some measure, the data and proposals assembled in this volume (e.g.,
 the studies of sign language acquisition and emergence by Newport and by
 Kegl, Senghas, and Coppola) reveal additional clues for evaluating
 competing creole-genesis and language-change scenarios and the roles these
 scenarios attribute to child versus adult acquisition and to the
 interlanguage/pidgin data as PLD for acquisition in P/C contexts.
 Bickerton (1977, 67, n. 9; 1992, 313), Fischer (1978), Feldman,
 Goldin-Meadow, and Gleitman (1978), and others have long pointed out the
 relevance of sign language to creolization --- Gee and Goodhart (1985)
 provide a particularly detailed argumentation for the linkage.  One
 rationale is this: More often than not, Deaf children begin signing while
 being exposed either to relatively little PLD that they can access via the
 visual/gestural modality or to PLD from nonnative nonfluent signers ---
 pidgin(-like) signed data.  As it turns out, a good amount of such PLD and
 of the data produced in turn by the learners' emerging grammars is, in
 certain instances, directly observable and open to precise measurements.
 Such direct observation and careful comparison between PLD and attained
 grammars is impossible for most cases of creolization --- pending the
 availability of time machines (see Bickerton 1987, 231; Singler 1993, 249,
 n. 5).  Thus, results from sign language research, too often overlooked in
 creole studies, are pregnant in implications for creole-genesis and
 language-change theories."

p17-18

 "From an empirical viewpoint, systematically recruiting directly measurable
 data from recently created languages gives a tremendous boost to our
 understanding of grammatical invention via language acquisition.  This, I
 believe, is the first volume where studies on creolization, language change
 and (the acquisition and emergence) of sign languages have combined to
 explore UG.  To this end, Kegl, Senghas, and Coppola's chapter reports a
 key study of language emergence in real time, as it has been unfolding
 among signers in Nicaragua.  There, previously isolated signers with
 restricted and idiosyncratic home-sign systems have recently come into a
 contact situation favorable to the emergence of expanded (pidgin- then
 creole-like) signed languages.  Newport's chapter examines related
 phenomena at the level of individuals acquiring ASL from PLD provided by
 nonnative signers.  Indeed, it is often the case that signed languages are
 natively acquired by deaf children born to HEARING parents.  Like the
 adults in Newport's study, such parents typically have limited,
 second-language proficiency in the signed language (if any), and it is this
 nonnative, restricted input, of a variable, unstable and UG-incompatible
 nature --- a pidgin, as it were --- that (initially) makes up the PLD of
 deaf children in the United States.  A somewhat similar situation exists in
 the sign language community of Nicaragua, as studied by Kegl, Senghas, and
 Coppola (this volume).  There, children's acquisition of the less
 developed, pidgin-like signed systems used by adults plays a crucial role
 in the emergence of a full-fledged sign language. ...

 ... Be that as it may, the discoveries reported in the chapters on sign
 language and acquisition of Irish may be instrumental in determining the
 respective roles that children and adults can IN PRINCIPLE play in
 creolization and in language change. ..."

p27-28

 "Elissa Newport's chapter provides an overview of several phenomena in sign
 language acquisition (from non- or near-native input) and of their
 implications for understanding creolization and language change.  Newport
 illustrates the kinds of results that studies of sign language acquisition
 can yield regarding maturational constraints on language development
 through childhood and adulthood, and the (possible) effects of such
 constraints on language change and emergence. ...

 Judy Kegl, Ann Senghas, and Marie Coppola also look at developmental data
 from signed languages. Their results can be interpreted as confirmating
 Newport's, but this time in the context of entire signing communities.
 [Kegl, Senghas and Coppola] investigate the emergence of a full-fledged
 signed language in Nicaragua via contact in the late 1970s between
 previously distinct, linguistically restricted ``homesign systems.... "