Everything about Derek Bickerton totally explained
Derek Bickerton (born
March 25,
1926) is a
linguist and
Professor Emeritus at the
University of Hawaii,
Honolulu. Based on his work in
creole languages in
Guyana and
Hawaii, he's proposed that the features of
creole languages provide powerful insights into the
development of
language both by individuals and as a feature of the human species. He is the father of
contemporary artist Ashley Bickerton.
A graduate of the
University of Cambridge,
England in 1949, Derek Bickerton entered academic life in the 1960s, first as a lecturer in English Literature at the
University of Cape Coast,
Ghana, and then, after a year's postgraduate work in linguistics at the
University of Leeds, as Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the
University of Guyana (1967-71). For twenty-four years he was a Professor of
Linguistics at the
University of Hawaii, having meanwhile received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the
University of Cambridge (1976).
Known the world over for his work on the evolution of language, he's the author of many books, including
Language and Species. Derek Bickerton's most recent book,
Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain, was co-written with
William H. Calvin and published by MIT Press.
In his book
Roots of Language, Bickerton speculates on a theory to answer three questions:
- How did creole languages originate?
- How do children acquire language?
- How did the language faculty originate as a feature of the human species?
In
Language and Species, he suggests that all three questions might be answered by speculating that the
origin of language might be traced to the
evolution of representation systems and symbolic thinking, together with a later development of formal
syntax. Using primitive
communication faculties, which then evolved in parallel, mental models became shared representations subject to
cultural evolution. In
Lingua ex Machina he and William Calvin revise this speculative theory by considering the biological foundations of symbolic representation and their influence on the evolution of the
brain.
Bibliography
Tropicana, A Novel., 1963
Dynamics Of A Creole System, 1975
The language bioprogram hypothesis, in: The Behavioral Sciences 7, 173-188, 1984.
Language and Human Behavior, 1995
Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain, 2000 (co-author with William H. Calvin)Further Information
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