Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-669899f699-vbsjw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-29T22:57:46.724Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Roots of Syntax: Anaphora and Negation in Creoles

from Part I - The Evolution of Syntax

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2025

By
William O’Grady
Edited by
Dany Adone  and
Astrid Gabel
Dany Adone
Affiliation:
Universität zu Köln
Astrid Gabel
Affiliation:
Universität zu Köln
Get access

Summary

O’Grady’s chapter discusses a recurring theme in Derek Bickerton’s work on creoles which focused on his observation, now somewhat controversial, that their morphosyntactic properties are surprisingly similar, which he attributed to a ‘language bioprogram’ bearing a close resemblance to Universal Grammar. O’Grady’s chapter explores a different line of reasoning by considering the role that processing pressures play in the syntax of creoles – and of human language in general. Drawing on data from anaphora and negation, both of which are well-documented core syntactic phenomena in natural language, he argues that their signature properties are shaped by considerations of computational efficiency and economy that can be traced to the need to minimize the burden on working memory.

Keywords

language evolutionCreolesacquisitionanaphoranegationprosessing pressures
Type
Chapter
Information
The Evolution, Acquisition and Development of Syntax
Insights from Creole Languages and Beyond
 , pp. 96 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Adone, Dany. (1994). The Aquisition of Mauritian Creole. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adone, Dany (2012). The Acquisition of Creole Languages: How Children Surpass Their Input. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderwald, Lieselotte. (2005). Negative concord in British English dialects. In Iveiri, Y. (ed.), Aspects of English Negation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 113–37.Google Scholar
Bartens, Angela. (2013). San Andres Creole English structure dataset. In Michaelis, S., Maurer, P., Haspelmath, M. & Huber, M. (eds.), Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://apics-online.info/contributions/10 (accessed on 2021-12-27.)Google Scholar
Bates, Elizabeth. (1984). Bioprograms and the innateness hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 188–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellugi, Ursula. (1967). The acquisition of the system of negation in children’s speech. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek. (1981). Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma Publishers.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek (1984). The language bioprogram hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 173–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bickerton, Derek (2008). Bastard Tongues. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek (2014). More than Nature Needs: Language, Mind and evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina & Schlesewsky, Matthias. (2009). The role of prominence information in the real-time comprehension of transitive constructions: A cross-linguistic approach. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3, 19–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chien, Yu-Chin & Wexler, Kenneth. (1990). Children’s knowledge of locality conditions in binding as evidence for the modularity of syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition, 1, 225–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. (2000). New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clackson, K., Felser, C. & Clahsen, H. (2011). Children’s processing of reflexives and pronouns in English: Evidence from eye-movements during listening. Journal of Memory and Language, 65(2), 128–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2011.04.007CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohn, Neil & Paczynski, Martin. (2013). Prediction, events, and the advantage of agents: the processing of semantic roles in visual narrative. Cognitive Psychology, 67, 73–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Conroy, Anastasia, Takahashi, Eri, Lidz, Jeffrey & Phillips, Colin. (2009). Equal treatment for all antecedents: How children succeed with Principle B. Linguistic Inquiry, 40, 446–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cunnings, I., Patterson, C. & Felser, C.. (2014). Variable binding and coreference in sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 71(1), 39–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.10.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeGraff, Michel. (2003). Against creole exceptionalism. Language, 79, 391–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeGraff, Michel (2009). Language acquisition in creolization and, thus, language change: Some Cartesian-uniformitarian boundary conditions. Language and Linguistic Compass, 3/4, 888–971.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Déprez, Viviane. (2017). What is strict negative concord? Lessons from French-based creoles. In Ziegler, D. & Bao, Z. (eds.), Negation and Contact: With Special Focus on Singapore English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 81–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Déprez, Viviane & Henri, Fabiola. (2018a). Conclusions. In Déprez, V. & Henri, F. (eds.), Negative Concord: The View from Creoles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 313–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Déprez, Viviane & Henri, Fabiola (2018b). Introduction. In Déprez, V. & Henri, F. (eds.), Negative Concord: The View from Creoles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 1–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swart, De, Henriette, & Ivan Sag. (2002). Negation and negative concord in Romance. Linguistics and Philosophy, 25, 373–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Falk, Yehuda. (2006). Subjects and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fattier, Dominique. (1998). Contribution à l’étude de la genèse d’un créole: l’Atlas linguistique d’Haïti, cartes et commentaires, 6 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Provence, Presses universitaires du Septentrion.Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga, van Kemenade, Ans, Koopman, Willem & Wim van der Wurff. (2001). The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giannakidou, Anastasia & Zeijlstra, Heddie. (2017). The landscape of negative dependencies: Negative concord and n-words. In Everaert, M. & van Riemstijk, H. (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2nd ed. Boston: Wiley.Google Scholar
Greenfield, William. (1830). A Defence of the Surinam Negro-English Version of the New Testament. London: Samuel Bagster.Google Scholar
Guasti, Maria Teresa. (2002). Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin & the APiCS Consortium. (2013a). Negation and indefinite pronouns. In Michaelis, S., Maurer, P., Haspelmath, M. & Huber, M. (eds.), The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures, chapter 102. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://apics-online.info/parameters/102#3/12.77/34.08Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin & the APiCS Consortium, (2013b). Reflexive constructions. In Michaelis, S., Maurer, P., Haspelmath, M. & Huber, M. (eds.), The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures, chapter 87. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://apics-online.info/parameters/87#2/13.8/5.0Google Scholar
Hawkins, John. (2004). Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, John (2014). Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hein, Johannes, Cory Bill, Imke Driemel, Aurore Gonzalez, Ivona Ilić & Paloma Jeretič. 2022. Negative concord in the acquisition of English and German: Some results from a corpus study. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 58. Available at: https://www.johannes-hein.de/documents/CLS58Proceedingspaper.pdf. Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence. (2011). Introduction. In Horn, L. (ed.), The Expression of Negation. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 1–7.Google Scholar
Huang, Yan. (2000). Anaphora. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. (1933). Essentials of English Grammar. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Kemmerer, David. (2012). The cross-linguistic prevalence of SOV and SVO word orders reflects the sequential and hierarchical representation of action in Broca’s area. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6, 50–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kouwenberg, Silvia. (2013). Papiamentu structure dataset. In Michaelis, S., Maurer, P., Haspelmath, M. & Huber, M. (eds.) Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://apics-online.info/contributions/47Google Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian, Malchukov, Andrej & Moravcsik, Edith (eds.). (2014). Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moscati, Vincenzo. (2020). Children (and some adults) overgeneralize negative concord: The case of fragment answers to negative questions in Italian. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 26, 169–78.Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko. (2008). Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change. London: Continuum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muysken, Pieter & Smith, Norval. (2011). Reflexives in the creole languages: An interim report. In Adone, D. & Plag, I. (eds.), Creolization and Language Change. Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 45–64Google Scholar
O’Grady, William. (2005). Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Grady, William (2015). Anaphora and the case for emergentism. In MacWhinney, B. & O’Grady, W. (eds.), The Handbook of Language Emergence. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 100–22.Google Scholar
O’Grady, William (2022). Natural Syntax: An Emergentist Primer. 3rd ed. http://ling.hawaii.edu/william-ogrady/ and researchgate.net.Google Scholar
Orita, Naho, Oho, Hajime, Feldman, Naomi & Lidz, Jeffrey. (2021). Japanese children’s knowledge of the locality of zibun and kare. Language Acquisition, 28, 327–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.1899181CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan. (1992). Anaphors in English and the scope of binding theory. Linguistic Inquiry, 23, 261–303.Google Scholar
Robinson, Mary & Thoms, Gary. (2021). On the syntax of English variable negative concord. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 27(1), Article 24, 195–204.Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan & Wasow, Thomas. (1999). Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.Google Scholar
Smith, Ian. (1974–75). Unpublished field notes from Batticaloa, 1973–1974.Google Scholar
Thornton, Rosalind, Notley, Anna, Moscati, Vincenzo & Crain, Stephen. (2016). Two negations for the price of one. Glossa, 1(1), Article 45, 1–30, http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.Google Scholar
Unilang. No date. Papiamentu for beginners. https://unilang.org/course.php?res=73Google Scholar
Auwera, van der, Johan, Lauren Van Alsenoy, . (2016). On the typology of negative concord. Studies in Language, 40, 473–512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rij, Van, Jacolien, Hedderik van Rijn & Hendriks, Petra. (2010). Cognitive architectures and language acquisition: A case study in pronoun comprehension. Journal of Child Language, 37, 731–66.Google ScholarPubMed
Williams, Joseph. (1975). Origins of the English Language: A Social and Linguistic History. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Zeijlstra, Hedde. (2004). Sentential negation and negative concord. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Zeijlstra, Hedde (2016). Negation and negative dependencies. Annual Review of Linguistics, 2, 233–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhou, Peng, Crain, Stephen & Thornton, Rosalind. (2014). Children’s knowledge of double negative structures in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 23, 333–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×