Göteborg University
gadelii@african.gu.se

This paper argues that Bickerton (1990, 1996,1998) is basically correct when he claims that the development from proto-language to "modern language" equals the development of pidgin language into creole.

Basing myself on a number of constructions in French pidgins, creoles and Hexagonal French, I argue that pidginization of Hexagonal French, leading to French pidgins, involves restructuring of the linguistic system to the extent that grammatical morphemes, free and inflectional, are lost. The resulting pidgin has a more or less topic – comment-like structure, where highly polysemous lexical items are concatenated to each other and communicative success highly depends on use of contextual information. It is not unreasonable to assume, as Bickerton does, that human proto-language must have largely resembled such a pidgin.

When creolization takes place, the pidgin is enriched with a grammatical apparatus so as to be able to fulfil the functions required of any natively spoken first language. In the terms of chomskyan grammatical theory, creolization can be seen as the superposing of a hierarchy of functional projections on top of ordinary lexical projections. Consequently, pidgins can be thought to have lexical projections only, upon which the functional structure emerging during creolization is built. Now functional projections in languages can be "visible" in two ways, namely by having linguistic material base-generated in them or by having lexical items moved into them. I will here call the first phenomenon "lexicalization" and the second "feature checking by movement". The main argument of the paper is that creoles never initially use movement to check grammatical features, but rely on "lexicalization". This means that functional meanings are expressed by free grammatical morphemes in creoles. As examples of these, we may mention classical creole phenomena such as preverbal TMA particles and various kinds of determiners, which by the way in most cases have a more articulate structure than in the original lexifier language. It is reasonable to assume that Man‘s first "modern language" also had this quality, i.e. that grammatical meanings were expressed by free morphemes and not inflectional ones, and that grammatical features were checked by "lexicalization" of these free morphemes and not by movement. It should however be noted that not all function words which are lost in pidginization immediately reappear in creoles. For example, it would seem that some prepositions and complementizers present in the superstratum are absent in the creole. This difference between these items on the one hand and TMA-markers and determiners on the other will be further analyzed.

Once creolization has taken place, the creole will develop as any natural language does, i.e. with the gradual erosion of free morphemes into bound ones and the increasing need for verb and noun movement to check morphosyntactic features. Incidentally, the picture sketched above denies grammaticalization as an ingredient increolization: it is rather believed that grammatical items such as the tense marker bin in English creoles or té in French ones are directly inserted in the functional projections in question, i.e. the position is "lexicalized" with a functional item whose linguistic provenance is basically irrelevant, but which has not developed out of a previously lexical item.

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