CHAPTER 16 THE PRIMACY OF ASPECT IN FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: THE PIDGIN-CREOLE CONNECTION Roger W. Andersen and Yasuhiro Shirai 1. INTRODUCTION Since the early 1970s, with studies such as Bronckart and Sinclair (1973), Brown (1973), and Antinucci and Miller (1976), there has been considerable in- terest in the acquisition of verb morphology, with a strong emphasis on the acqui- sition of tense and aspect. During this same period, Bickerton (1974) proposed that creole languages around the world exhibit striking evidence of linguistic uni- versals in the area of tense and aspect: Iam therefore claiming that what distinguishes a creole language from a pidgin on the one hand and a developed standard language on the other is simply that a creole is much closer than either to linguistic universals, in particular to natural semantax” (italics in original). (From reprinted 1974 paper, in Day, 1980, p. 5.) Creole languages arise in contexts where people who speak different languages are brought together out of economic necessity, colonialization, slavery, and so forth. When the slaves far outnumbered the masters, attempts to learn the masters’ Janguage as a common language resulted in a minimal second language (L2) called a pidgin, which barely resembled the masters’ language as they spoke it. The staves had little access to their masters’ language and most learned the pidgin from each other, moving it even further away from the target—the master’s lan- guage. When the children of the pidgin speakers grew up in such a community a7 Hund vf Second Laawace Aequisainn uycighs 1996 ts Seathey created a new natural native language (NL) from this pidgin. This new lan- guage is called a creole language. Bickerton (1981), who expanded this proposal considerably, devotes an entire chapter to the connection between creole universals and language acquisition. As he states in his introduction: In Chapter 3, which will deal with “normal” language acquisition in noncreole societies, I shall show that some of the things which children seem to acquire effortlessly, as well as some which they get consistently wrong—both equally puzzling to previous accounts of “language learning” —follow naturally from the theory which was developed to account for creole origins: that all members of our species are born with a bioprogram for language which can function even in the absence of adequate input. (p. xiii) In his extensive discussion of tense—aspect (pp. 26-30 for pidgins, pp. 58-59 and pp. 72-98 for creoles, pp. 146-181 for normal acquisition) he argues that “normal” language acquisition operates differently from creolization (the process of creation of a creole language) because the child is presented with a viable learn- able system—his parents’ or caretakers’ language. The first-generation creole speakers, in contrast, cannot acquire the tense-aspect of their parents’ or care- takers’ language—the pidgin— because it does not have a coherent consistent sys- tem. The children must therefore create the tense—aspect from scratch, relying on the innate bioprogram that is the focus of Bickerton’s book. In spite of these differences between natural language acquisition and the cre- ation of a creole language. Bickerton argued that independent research on L1 acquisition provides evidence that children follow the two bioprogram univer- sals specific to tense~aspect: the state~process distinction and the punctual— nonpunctual distinction. The state—process distinction hypothesis states that children do not attach progressive or “nonpunctual” markers! to stative verbs in initial stages of acquisition. The punctual-nonpunctual distinction hypothesis states that children mark the distinction between an event with no duration and a durative event or situation (including habitual and iterative). Nonpunctual means durative.” This review will not evaluate Bickerton’s claims. There are adequate sources on this topic already available. For example, Bickerton (1984a) is a thorough restate- ment of his bioprogram proposal with extensive discussion by a large number of linguists, psychologists, and researchers from related disciplines. Romaine (1988) devoted two extensive chapters to “Language acquisition and the study of pidgins "By nonpunctual markers Bickerton means imperfective markers—linguistic forms that explicitly encode meanings of duration, progressivity, iteration, and so on. 24s is discussed later, Bickerton’s terminology has often been confusing, especially because punc- tual and stative ave usually used to refer to inherent semantic aspect, whereas Bickerton frequently uses punctual and nonpunctual to also refer to grammatical aspect (perfective and imperfective, re- spectively, in Comrie, 1976).and creoles” (Chap. 6, pp. 204-255) and “Language universals and pidgins and creoles” (Chap. 7, pp. 256-310). Newmeyer (1988) contains an extensive dia- logue between Bickerton and Peter Muysken, a frequent critic of Bickerton’s pro- posals (pp. 268~306). And the journal First Language contains an extensive dis- cussion of the issues by Cziko (1989a, pp. 1-31, 1989b, pp. 51-56), Bickerton (1989, pp. 33-37), Kuczaj (1989, pp. 39-44), and Weist (1989, pp. 45-49). In addition, Andersen (1981, 1983) provided a thorough discussion of the relation- ship between creolization and pidginization on the one hand, and language acqui- sition, on the other, The purpose of this review is to assess the state of our understanding of both L1 and L2 acquisition of tense and aspect. Such a review is important independent of Bickerton’s proposals. But Bickerton’s strong proposals and the ensuing contro- versies in this area provide additional motivation for such a review. What is at stake is the degree to which there is evidence across the various language acqui- sition studies on tense and aspect for a common path of development independent of language-specific features, what the nature of that evidence is, and what expla- nations have been offered to account for such evidence. The most striking expla- nations proposed are in the area of “linguistic and cognitive universals,” including Bickerton’s bioprogram. We will also review evidence within the literature on L2 acquisition, which was not available when Bickerton (1981) was written. In the search for universals in language acquisition research, it is important to distinguish (1) the description of potential cases of universals from (2) expla- nations for these putative universals. In this chapter we first attempt to describe the phenomenon and show that numerous studies attest to its existence. Then we discuss explanations that have been offered to account for the described phenomenon. It has been consistently observed that L1 and L2 learners, in the early stages of, acquiring verbal morphology, use tense~aspect markers selectively according to the inherent lexical aspect* of the verb to which the tense—aspect marker is at- tached or with which it is associated (Andersen, 1989, 1991). For example, in L1 acquisition of English, children initially use past marking on accomplishment and achievement verbs much more frequently than on activity and stative verbs, while attaching the progressive -ing to activity verbs more frequently than to accom- plishment and achievement verbs. This phenomenon of limiting a tense-aspect marker to a restricted class of verbs, according to the inherent aspect of the verb, is known as the Primacy of Aspect (POA). In spite of the relatively large number This discussion is fawed, however, by pervasive terminological confusion, relating partly to Bick- certon’s confusing use of nonpunctual to refer to both inherent semantic aspect and grammatical aspect and partly by other writers’ rather idiosyncratic use and interpretation of terms. Terminology will be explained in section Il. Here it is sufficient to note that verbs fall into one of four categories according to their inherent aspect: states, activities, accomplishments, or achievements. ‘The terms are Vendler’s (1967) and the distinctions date back to Aristotle.