The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics

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dimensions of English 'in' from its usage. Katseff Page Page numbers This difficulty in learning L2 prepositions is present in more standard languages as well. A test of adults learning Arabic in the classroom showed that their mastery of prepositions was quite poor, even for more advanced learners (http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol38/no3/p26.htm). Although the use of prepositions is systematic, the system is hard to learn, perhaps because it is not explicitly obvious to language users. In the context of standard languages, these adult learners leave scarcely a footprint: their speech is considered accented or aberrant and is not incorporated into the language. But there is in fact a context where these imperfectly learned semantic fields are incorporated into the standard language: pidgins and creoles. Pidgins and Creoles To understand the relevance of pidgins and creoles to a typology of spatial semantics, a few short definitions are in order. A pidgin is the language that arises when groups of people from diverse language backgrounds are forced to interact for some limited purpose. In one common scenario, pidgins arose when large groups of slaves were taken to plantations and required to communicate with each other and with their owners. Creoles are like pidgins, but more complete. By one definition, they are used in more discourse contexts than pidgins. In another, they are the language that results when kids learn and regularize a pidgin (McWhorter 2000).
Katseff Page Page numbers Many who research pidgins and creoles believe that in witnessing a language as it is being created, they can gain some insight into language genesis. It is thought that, since pidgins are built from scratch by people with no common language, it would be surprising and telling if the languages they created had similar features. For example, if these new, unrelated languages all over the world share SVO word order, then perhaps there is something cognitively basic about SVO as opposed to other word orders. This particular hypothesis has been thoroughly disproven (McWhorter 2000), but similar lines of research are still being pursued. In this spirit, many research programs have focused on word order and morphological markers in in pidgins. There are plenty of other reasons that various grammatical elements might be represented in unrelated pidgins. The most obvious of these is that many of them use the same (or same set of) superstrate languages, which means that different pidgins may not be as different as we think. In spite of these difficulties, it would be interesting to note whether spatial terms, representative of a sensory activity turned linguistic, share similar categorizations across pidgins. These parallels would be all the more striking if the way they carve up space is different from either parent language. A Hypothesis If pidgins are indeed formed and used primarily among adults with different spatial language backgrounds, it should be difficult to agree on a common spatial system. Thus the set of words to describe spatial relations in a creole should be very small (a highly
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The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics

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