The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics

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Katseff Page Page numbers (like Spanish) have a single word en that covers relations that in English would use on or in, while others have finer distinctions than English. Dutch, for one, has two different types of on and two types of in. But the similarities end there. Spatial terms are otherwise quite different from color terms. There have been attempts to create an implicational hierarchy for spatial terms (for a thorough review of these, see Levinson et al 2003). The implicit argument is that some spatial terms are more basic than others, and there is a set order of evolution for these terms. By this reasoning, in order to have a word for X (e.g., on), a language must also have a word for Y (e.g., at), even if there is nothing in the meaning of either word requiring this. These larger scale efforts to categorize the semantics of spatial expressions have largely failed. The most expansive attempt thus far is a project conducted by Steve Levinson and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute. They are collecting spatial terms from a large sample of languages. The group has made several attempts to extract some regularity from the situations that individual prepositions describe. They hypothesize that with the right analysis, a pattern indicating the most basic use of in or under would emerge. However, no clear patterns have been found. It is still possible that there is regularity to assignment of spatial terms, and the problem is that situations are categorized for this purpose using a scheme that we have not yet uncovered. However, this implies that this categorization is neither intuitive nor salient, a result that would be troublesome to many linguists. Conservatively, then, this result indicates that spatial terms are assigned in an
Katseff Page Page numbers ungeneralizable, language-specific way. Significantly, this predicts that spatial terms should not be transferable between languages (no borrowing). One interesting corollary of this result is that there is a critical period for learning spatial terms. In a seminal paper, Bowerman (1996) report on expressing spatial relations in Korean and English. These two languages go about this task very differently. Aside from gross differences – Korean uses verbs, while English uses nouns – there are many semantic distinctions as well. For example, Korean distinguishes terms based on method of attachment. Yet children tend to acquire their native language's conception of spatial relations before the age of two, regardless of the language. Importantly, these terms, so easy to pick up in childhood, are very difficult to master as adults. Even intuitively, this conclusion seems obvious: one of the easiest ways to identify a non-native speaker of one's language is to listen to their preposition use; prepositions are one of the areas of language mastered last, and often is never learned completely. A striking example of this is found in Sierra Leone Krio, a creole language which, for reasons that will be explained in the next section, has borrowed extensively from English. Among these borrowings are 91 idiomatic expressions derived from English 'in' or 'in the', e.g., in ven 'in vein', in trObul 'in trouble', in raytin 'in writing'. Remarkably, Sierra Leone Krio does not use 'in' to denote spatial relations. 'In' is not even a preposition in this language (Fyle and Jones 1980)! Each of these 91 expressions were borrowed holistically as frozen forms. This indicates that (adult) learners of this language, though exposed to English, were unable to extract the myriad semantic
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The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics

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