Spoken and Sign Language Emergence: A Comparison
Peter Bakker
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is a good overview and comparison between creoles and sign languages
Line-by-line:
46-51.
McWhorter has written about Absence of properties, but there are also authors who have written about PRESENCE of properties that set creoles apart from non-creoles:
Bakker, Peter. 2015. Creole languages have no… — but they do have… . Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 30:1, 167–176.
Bakker, Peter, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen & Eeva Sippola. 2017. Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.211
Blasi, Damián, Susanne Michaelis & Martin Haspelmath. 2017. Grammars are robustly
transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages. Nature Human Behaviour
(Letters) 1.723–29. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0192-4
Daval-Markussen, Aymeric, Kristoffer Friis Bøegh and Peter Bakker. 2017. West African languages and creoles worldwide. In: Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, ed. by Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva Sippola. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins. 141-174.
Muysken, Pieter C. 2015. Conclusion: Feature distribution in the West Africa-Surinam Trans-Atlantic Sprachbund. In Surviving the Middle Passage. The West Africa-Surinam Sprachbund, P. C. Muysken, N. Smith & R. D. Borges (eds), 393–408. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt & Bernd Kortmann. 2009. The morphosyntax of varieties of English worldwide: A quantitative perspective. Lingua 119. 1643–1663.
Line 61, 73: thios could be cited:
Kouwenberg, Silvia. 1992. From OV to VO linguistic negotiation in the development of Berbice Dutch creole. Lingua Volume 88, Issues 3–4, December 1992, Pages 263-299
- 70: Marathi may be an adstrate rather than substrate
- 72: I am not sure what “all but no” means, but there are a few historical sources for BD, like a word list by Groen and a few quotes in the autobiography by Swaving, whose wife was a BD Creole speaker.
- 81 is > are
- 84. It may be relevant to mention that main clauses with auxiliaries also have the main verb in the end, and foreigner talk as well. “jij hier lopen”
110: Flaherty et al: not in list.
112: what is “silent gesturing”?
128: as for the monogenesis of French creoles of the Caribbean: as far as I know, there are quite a few grammatical differences between Antillean, Guyanese and Haitian, which point to at least three independent grammaticalizations (Cf. Philip Baker’s work, e.g. 2001). The lexical data indeed point to a common source. But many of the grammatical markers are different.
Chapter 3: determiners.
- Kluge 2000
Kluge, Angela. 2000. THE GBE LANGUAGE VARIETIES OF WEST AFRICA: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL FEATURES. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Arts in Language and Communication Research School of English, Communication and Philosophy University of Wales, College of Cardiff
Is a thesis with data from 47 Gbe varieties. Indeed most of them have determiners, but nine of them have not.
- Velupillai 2015
Velupillai, Viveka. 2015. Pidgins, Creoles and Mixed Languages: An Introduction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
She has statistics about determiners in creoles and non-creoles, and pidgins.
- 359-367.
71.9 % of pidgins have no def or indef art.
7.5 % of creoles have no indef article.
18.8 % of creoles have no def. art.
31.9 of WALS languages have no articles.
- 155. Note however that the creole system is both formally and functionally quite different from French.
Section 3.2.
I think that the presence of determiners in creoles is exaggerated, but admnittedly, I do not know the literature cited, and have not checked. Some generativists see non-overt determiners when the theory predicts they should be there.
3.3.
Specific is a sentence-based category (local), determiners are discourse-based (text).
- 213
alignment wrong
- 217-218. How rto determine “borrowing rather than integral”?
- 266, 268: could “I did” be replaced by “me”? I know some people who speak like that, when they have a free word order language as L1.
272: Dutch Sign Language: replace with Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN), whioch is the official name (and called like that later).
274: IX ????
- “Creole languages develop”… apparently not most French creoles.
307: apsect
309: sure about Mauritian?
312: SAR tá also marks habitual, isn’t it?
318: Chinook was a young creole.
Jacobs 1932 text p. 47 has 10 instances of “uk” on one page with not many words. Not only the phonological reduction, but also (2) the frequency (3) the semantics of the translations make clear that it IS a DET rather than a DEM.
Jacobs, Melville. 1932. Notes on the structure of Chinook Jargon. Language 8: 27-50.
324: sure?
326 “In stead, even”. Better: “It should be mentioned that also…”
328-330: rephrase
332: if referring to substrates here, the influence of substrates is exaggerated.
337: what does “conditional” mean here
345: Friedman 1975: too old?
349: “in occurring inside”
- is there a statistical study showing that? Intuitivelky, I agree.
381: how is it determined that Ewe was or was not a main substrate?
386: “acquired incompletely”. After Baker “off target”, 1990, remarks like this should be avoided, unless there is proof of a target.
398: Dutch doorgaan, ga door (litt. Through-go) means “continue to”. Hij gaat door met lopen (it sounds a little awkward, though). If dóu means “arrive”, could it mean “walk until arrived”?
432: “very slowly”. Is there evidence for that? Inflextional affixation must also distinguish between e.g. person on nouns, person on verbs, TMA on verbs. And also contextual and inherent inflection (Booij) behave differently. Difficult to generalize.
- I do not agree that the tonal spread is a kind of agreement. Better to think of the two serial verbs as a single unit, and the tonal sandhi connects them.
503: is are
544: languageS
628: Lee: her book is out.
contextual and inherent inflection (Booij)
673:
Singler is lacking
671: Lingua italics
685: Sign L of the N (CAPS).
REFS:
Baker, Philip. 1990. Off target? Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 5(1): 107–119.
doi: 10.1075/jpcl.5.1.07bak
Baker, Philip. 2001. No creolisation without prior pidginisation. Te Reo 44: 31–50.
Author Response
see attachment
Reviewer 2 Report
The commonalities between sign languages and creoles and similarities in the processes of language genesis in these two situations is an issue badly in need of revisiting, so I am excited to see the topic covered, but this manuscript needs significant revision before it can be published. The argumentation throughout the paper is unclear. Often, it wasn't until the final "implications for the language faculty" section that I understood the overall claim the author intended to make, and even backtracking I found it difficult to see how the text built to this claim. For example, in the word order section, the introduction reads as if the claim will be that sign languages and creoles show word order in general is not a key feature of language, the two main subsections are quite hard to follow, and then the final section seems to suggest that the takeaways are SVO is not default and SOV is original/fundamental, but then the very end of the paper just presents the SVO claim. In the determiner section, the author presents an unclear argument about creoles and then says the situation is "similar" in sign languages, but similar to... what? The final section about new information versus given information is an entirely reasonable proposal, but there's no textual crescendo to that proposal. In addition to overall unclarity in argumentation, there are also a handful of textual issues - e.g., saying "these Philippine languages" without ever introducing anything for these to anaphorically refer to.
The section on subordination seems to me to be a total misrepresentation of Padden's analysis of subject pronoun copy. Subject pronoun copy is a construction that is sensitive to the distinction between coordination and subordination, but it does not mark subordination.
In the discussion of tense and aspect, it is important to note that the sign aspects that he's discussing are largely lexical aspect markers. Here, too, the overall argumentation is disjointed and hard to follow. The final section focuses in on the centrality of aspect marking, but aspect is barely addressed in the first section n creoles.
The paper initially presents spatial inflection as an immediate and universal property in sign languages. It does ultimately acknowledge that this property has been shown to take time to develop in certain sign languages, but he doesn't give this observation the centrality it deserves. The importance of this detail is especially clear given recent evidence that spatial inflection is not an inevitability in sign languages. There are now known cases of sign languages that have persisted without a grammaticalized spatial inflection system for several generations.
I also think the paper needs drastically more empirical support - each of the six grammatical features should include illustrative data from both sign languages and creoles. I would also suggest incorporating information from APiCS to substantiate claims about relative (in)frequency of patterns.
Theoretically, I do not share many of the assumptions of the author, and I think some of these theoretically contested matters need to be handled with more care. For example, the author starts by acknowledging that the pidgin-to-creole cycle is not uniformly agreed upon, but then goes on to say, without additional comment, that creoles are the product of "interrupted transmission" as if this is uniformly agreed upon. Along these same lines, there's quite a lot of theoretical controversy over whether direct speech reports are subordinated. The author should also take care with throwing around terms like "type of language" and "universal". Also, at the beginning the author says creoles are defined by a combined absence of features, some of which are always present in older languages --- which features are meant here?
Some missing key references:
- Research on recursion in homesign (Goldin-Meadow)
- Event Visibility Hypothesis (Wilbur 2003)
- Range of research on the development or lack thereof of spatial inflection in emerging sign languages
- Lepic 2016 on ASL compounds
Author Response
see attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
