![Derek Bickerton, Professor Emeritus In The Department Of Linguistics At The University Of Hawai‘i At Mānoa, Passed Away On March 5, 2018 At The Age Of 91.](https://manoa.hawaii.edu/linguistics/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/bickerton-260x300.png)
A seminal thinker and visionary, Derek laid out an important goal for himself, which he described in the introduction to The Roots of Language (1981), one of the most discussed books in the history of linguistics:
Language has made our species what it is, and until we really understand it—that is, understand what is necessary for it to be acquired and transmitted, and how it interacts with the rest of our cognitive apparatus—we cannot hope to understand ourselves. And unless we can understand ourselves, we will continue to watch in helpless frustration while the world we have created slips further and further from our control.
Derek pursued the goal of understanding language and humanity with unwavering intensity throughout his life, developing and extending his ideas in Language and Species (1990), Bastard Tongues (2008), Adam’s Tongue (2009), and More than Nature Needs (2014), as well as in numerous papers, presentations and speeches over four decades. The origin of language, the genesis of pidgins and creoles, and the nature of the genetic endowment for language were endlessly fascinating to him, and he wrote about them with ever-increasing eloquence and insight.
Derek relished disagreement and controversy, recognizing turmoil as the cost of moving forward. People listened to him, and he made a lasting difference—in linguistics and in the lives of his students and colleagues. I speak from experience in this regard. He was the first person to reach out to me when I arrived in Mānoa as a visiting colleague many years ago. During the period that our careers overlapped, I enjoyed numerous stimulating conversations with him on linguistic matters, and I cherish the memory of our social interactions as well.
No matter the turmoil in his academic endeavors, Derek enjoyed a rich family life. His remarkable and elegant wife Yvonne was the love of his life, and their synergy as a couple was evident to anyone who saw them together. Derek paid tribute to their long and happy marriage in a poem, the last few lines of which strike me as a fitting epilogue to his life.
Yet do we regret that we stayed
So long at the feast, gobbled up
All that was there for the taking?
Would we have gained by forsaking
The party early, our cup
Undrunk, our parts half-played?
No. There’s so much that we’d have lost:
Learning at last how love grows
When our animals finally sleep
Learning to savor the deep
Joy of mere closeness—God knows
Such things are worth any cost.
Following the announcement of Derek’s passing, a number of friends and colleagues have contacted the Department of Linguistics with their thoughts and remembrances, which we will share at this site in order of their receipt. If you would like to submit a remembrance, please send it to the main office email and CC Dr. William O’Grady.
These remembrances are accompanied by a memorial essay by Emanuel J. Drechsel which will appear in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. It is reproduced here with the permission of the John Benjamins Publishing Company, to which we express our gratitude.
–William O’Grady
From Robert Blust
What I loved most about Derek was that he was a fighter for what he believed was right. I followed his personal evolution from a creolist, to one of the few linguists who dared to take on the question of the origin of language, and to approach it in a biologically defensible way. After his retirement I invited Derek on several occasions to come to my 646 class (‘Advanced comparative method’) to give us his take on how language came into being in our remote quasi-human ancestors. I assigned readings first from Language and Species (1990), and later from Adam’s Tongue (2009), and encouraged the students to have questions ready for him when he came to visit us. We had some lively discussions, one of which even led to him incorporating some suggestions of mine into the second edition of Adam’s Tongue. Toward the end it became apparent that it was getting harder for him to manage these discussions, and they stopped several years ago. My 646 class has seemed to have an ’empty spot’ ever since. We will all miss Derek, his fierce independence, and his unique and lasting contributions to both pidgin and creole linguistics and to the elusive question of how we became the only species on this planet to be blessed with the gift of language, a gift that may prove to be our undoing as a result of the power it has given us over Nature.
Robert Blust
UHM Department of Linguistics
From Tom (Talmy) Givón: Recuerdos to Bick
It is nigh impossible to express in human language, however supple or elegant it may strive to be, how much Derek meant in my life, and how much I shall miss him. He lived his life to the full, restless, reckless, haunted perhaps by the same sense that has always haunted me–that there is so much out there still waiting to be deciphered, always more and more however much you strive to go at it. And that the little time we are allotted on this miserable, breathtakingly beautiful vale-of-tears is never quite enough. Arrr.
If there was one quality that set Derek apart, it was his relentless audacity; that and his willingness to change course whenever the facts didn’t match a favored prediction, or when a new, implausible perspective beckoned. All that, and lastly, alas, his unrequited infatuation with Noam Chomsky. When we first corresponded, prior to the conference he organized in Hawaii in 1975 on Pidgins and Creoles, I sent him a paper suggesting that both Pidgins and Creoles reflected language universals–of pre-grammatical and grammaticalized communication, respectively. His first, snap reaction was “no way”, having come out of the substratum tradition of West Africa and the Caribbeans. A month later I got another note: “I re-analized my Hawaii Creole data, and you were right. Universals override substratum, leastwise when multiple substrata clash”.
In 1976 we published a joint paper on the Hawaii Pidgin, pointing out to credible pregrammatical universals of discourse-structure. A year later, at our 1977 symposium on Discourse and Syntax, he proposed to give a paper titled “Generative grammar meets the discourse monster”. He never submitted the paper for publication, and soon his book “Roots of Language” (1981) veered fatefully toward a Chomskian ‘bio-program’, presumably exemplified in the syntactic universals of Creoles. Counter Chomsky, however, he insisted (with John Lamendella, Dan Slobin and myself) that the gradual development of childhood grammars recapitulated the gradual evolution of human language. For many years afterwards he was a steadfast adherent of The Master. By our 2008 Symposium on the Genesis of Syntactic Complexity, though, he zagged again, taking issue with Chomsky’s anti-Darwinian approach to language evolution. Still, he kept challenging me to give a non-arbitrary account of the ambiguity of ‘competence’ clauses such as “I have orders to deliver”. My eventual account (in “The Story of Zero”, 2016) didn’t mollify him. “You have shown only a statistical trend (over 90% of the textual sample). Not enough”. The graduality of evolution didn’t transfer to graduality of diachronic change.
In the late 1970s we submitted the soon-to-be-notorious Island Project to NSF, proposing to track down in situ the gradual creation of a Pidgin language and eventually a Creole, by isolating several monolingual families on a Pacific island and studying their lingua-franca development, of both the adults’ Pidgin and the children’s Creole. We were soon denounced by the linguistic establishment’s guardians of PC at imperialists, colonialist and racists, with dark visions of Pitcairn Island looming on the Pacific horizon. One of Derek’s greatest regret was the eventual demise of the project. It was pulled back at the last minute by the highest level of the NSF bureaucracy after a most-encouraging response from the late Paul Chapin, long-time linguistics director at NSF. We were soon saddled with a forbidding committee of social-science luminaries, meeting twice on the So. Ute Rez in Ignacio, where I was working at the time.
Gradually, relentlessly, we were nickled-and-dimed to death. Eventually they agreed to fund us–provided we carried it out in an deserted European castle with non-exotic Western subjects. At a campground up the Piedra River drainage, above 10,000 feet, we sat around the fire one evening, Derek, Yvonne and myself. The luster had gone out of the project, we concluded. It was a nobrainer, we declined to pursue it any further. Derek related the story in a later book, “Bastard Tongues”, a somewhat sanitized version. We contemplated a fictional account of the real version, but by then he had given up on his fiction. Alas, he had the wildest imagination.
When after their retirement Derek and Yvonne moved for a while to rural Southern Oregon, I invited him to go chase Sasquatch with me in the forests of Northern California, up Bluff Creek in the drainage of the lower Klamath, where the famed–faked–Paterson/Gimlin tape of a female Sasquatch was reputed to have been filmed. Derek’s limp, by then pronounced, never stopped him from traipsing all over the mountainside. I told him I was not so much into chasing Sasquatch, but rather into tracking the Sasquatchers (or Sasq-nuts, as I used to call them; a tight, secretive international fraternity I stumbled upon by sheer accident and eventually wrote my 2011 novel “Sasquatch” about). He said “never mind, let’s go have us some fun”. On my office wall, next to the most iconic Patterson-Gimlin photo, I still have a framed fake of Derek, leaning on the Louse Creek sign, with a wooden Sasquatch head–snapped from a bust in front of the country store below Bluff Creek–superimposed over his grinning face.
Above all, Derek was about the relentless pursuit of knowledge, spiked with a healthy dose of adventure; be it in Spain in the 1960’s (where we coincided but didn’t know each other), in Africa, in the Caribbeans or in Hawaii. I’ll always remember that long-ago evening around the fire on Molokai island when Derek, Yvonne and I, stoned out of our gourds, agreed to go ahead with the Island Project. It’s going to be revolutionary, we agreed, unprecedented. But more to the point, Derek observed, it was going to be fun.
T. Givón
White Cloud Ranch
Ignacio, Colorado
From Vincent O. Cooper
I first met Derek Bickerton when I was a graduate student attending the Linguistics Summer Institute at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. At the institute I took two of his graduate seminars and was impressed by his energetic , though often controversial, promotion of creole language studies as a central field of theoretical linguistics and cognitive psychology. Over the years that followed I learned a great deal from him as a scholar, mentor, and friend. The field of sociolinguistics has lost one of its outstanding scholars.
Vincent O. Cooper, PhD
University of the Virgin Islands
From Joel Bradshaw
I took Derek’s sociolinguistics course in the fall of 1973, during my first semester of graduate linguistics at UH Mānoa, while still taking prerequisite courses in phonology and grammar. (Charlene Sato was in the same class.) I found the style as well as the content of Derek’s lectures fascinating. He had a gift for conveying big ideas in engaging stories. As he paced back and forth in front of the classroom in his typically disheveled fashion, I used to imagine him with a parrot on his shoulder, a patch over his eye, and a peg leg, telling us where to find the treasures we sought. (I never at that time imagined him in a kilt, dancing!)
Among the most memorable readings in that course were Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog’s Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change, and several articles by William Labov, by Gillian Sankoff on multilingualism, and by William Wang on lexical diffusion. (Derek also introduced me to the early novels of V.S. Naipaul, set in Trinidad and enriched by the creole spoken there, which I think I mined for some minor grammatical analysis.)
In 1977, after returning from fieldwork on Numbami, an Austronesian language in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea, I read Sankoff’s dissertation on “Social Aspects of Multilingualism in New Guinea,” based on her fieldwork among related languages in the same province. As a result, my first externally refereed publication was not a sketch of Numbami phonology or grammar, but an article on “Multilingualism and Language Mixture among the Numbami,” whose ancestral language was not the one most commonly spoken in their own village.
Derek also hired me for my final research assistantship, to look for grammatical similarities and differences between substrate languages and pidgin/creole varieties for his Change and Variation in Hawaiian English project. He later served on my dissertation committee. I wrote about word order changes in Oceanic languages in Papua New Guinea that were presumably due to contact with Papuan languages. Derek was helpful in sorting out changes that might be due to universal factors from those that were more likely due to the influence of substrate languages.
For instance, in 1976, Sankoff and Penny Brown had published an article in Language on “The Origins of Syntax in Discourse: A Case Study of Tok Pisin Relatives,” about relative clauses marked at both ends by ia, a discourse particle ubiquitous in Tok Pisin. With Derek’s encouragement, I presented a counterargument at the 1978 LSA Summer Institute at the University of Illinois titled “The Origins of Syntax in Syntax,” arguing that relative clauses marked at both ends are very rare among the languages of the world, but very common among the Austronesian languages of Morobe Province, PNG, and therefore are more likely due to the influence of local substrate languages, and not universal factors. That argument formed part of my dissertation.
I spent most of the 1980s working outside academia. When I returned to UH in the 1990s, it was not easy to get back up to speed on my own research agenda. Derek was very helpful in giving me detailed feedback on what became my first published article in the 1990s, about serial verb constructions, which are much discussed in pidgin and creole linguistics. He helped get my research back on track and his ideas still influence how I think about language variation.
Joel Bradshaw
From Thom Huebner: Memories of Derek — A Personal Perspective
No stranger to controversy, the lanky big-featured professor with a British accent and a graying comb-over cast an intimidating figure over this naïve twenty-five-year-old incoming graduate student when passing in the corridors of Moore Hall. But the buzz surrounding the recently published Dynamics of a Creole Continuum, louder internationally than at home, was enough to lure me into one of his courses one semester. The classes were never boring. Once hooked I would sit in awe as Bickerton at one moment would make an off-handed comment that was absolutely elegant, insightful, revolutionary and true, and in the next breath a statement that one could only wonder, “He can’t really mean that, can he?”
But it was exciting knowing that he listened to students as he was working out the details of Roots of Language in class with us. Much later, in Bastard Tongues, Bickerton articulated his view of the mentor / mentee relationship that he maintained throughout his life: “Students are more fun when you’re learning stuff from them than when they’re learning stuff from you” (p.258) That symbiotic relationship between Bickerton and his students has continued to shape all his search, from the origin of creoles to the origin of the human language faculty.
From my own evolving perspective, Derek’s dedication to his students brought out a warmer side of him. He’d listen not just to their research ideas and problems, but also to any personal problem that one might feel comfortable disclosing regarding any impediments to their study. One semester, while I was working on my dissertation in Hawai’I and Derek was on sabbatical in New York to be near his daughter, who was accepted into a prestigious ballet company, I had a chance to attend a conference in New York and met up with Derek and Yvonne for spaghetti dinner at their west side flat. I knew that when I came out to them I would never feel a warmer and more accepting environment. But they were more interested in exploring alternative options after NSF’s final refusal to fund Derek’s “Island Project.”
This was about the time that the novel King of the Sea was published. Very roughly inspired by a sequence of events that actually took place at the University of Hawai’I’s Marine Mammals Research Center, the fictional adaptation left me with three lasting impressions: 1) Bickerton’s a great story-teller. This was not his first novel. 2) Wow! Maybe he really HAS cracked the dolphin communication code; and 3) The novel has all the elements one might want to include in a made-for-movie adaptation: a tropical setting, an interracial romance between mainland haole grad student and exotic local girl (also a student), animal rights and animal communication, science fiction, international intrigue, even a little bestiality. I don’t know if Derek ever pursued a film contract and if so whatever came of it, but I still fell despite the fall of the KGB it would be a box office hit.
As sometimes happens, in academia and in life, when formal bonds have expired, distance ensues, aggravated by burdensome teaching schedules and heavy demands to focus one’s research and publish. And to be honest, I am still a little intimidated by him today. But I remember him as a man of unbounded curiosity and imagination, of quick wit and profound depth. The answers to the questions Bickerton has always asked will continue to have implications not just for all branches of linguistics but also for the social and cognitive sciences for years to come.
Thom Huebner
From John Rickford
Derek was a monumental figure in the study of Guyanese Creole and Creole Studies more generally, advancing both areas significantly during his lifetime. This is clear from the first email responses I received to my email yesterday sharing the news, including former UG students like Walter Edwards & Hubert Devonish, and the co-editor o the Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies, John Singler (although he had disagreed with Derek in the literature).
On a personal level, Derek was always encouraging to me and his work inspired and informed me. We will miss him.
From Ian Hancock: Remembering Derek
One afternoon in the late 1960s I was sitting at my Royal typewriter working on my dissertation when I answered the door to Derek. I’d begun a correspondence with him sometime earlier—not email, back then—and I hadn’t been expecting his visit, but there he was. I’m not sure what initiated our contact, though it must have been our shared interest in creoles; perhaps it had something to do with a bibliography of pidgin and creole languages I was helping to compile, and with the section on Guyanese. At any rate, that summer afternoon in London was the start of a friendship that lasted for nearly half a century. I still have one or two of those early letters.
Both of us, though British-born, have lived outside of the UK longer than we have lived in it. Generally, I’m not too impressed by the ex-pat Brits that I’ve encountered, and I suspect that Derk shared that observation. Perhaps because he wasn’t so much an “Englishman” but—as the cliché goes—a citizen of the world. Or much of it anyway. Exposed to West African Pidgin in Ghana, acquiring its distant cousin Creolese in Guyana then comparing it with “Da Kine” creole years later in Hawaii not as a socially remote scholar in each case but as someone who moved with the locals in many ways, and intimately.
That exposure to three different creoles spoken in widely-separated parts of the world was the catalyst that sowed the seeds of Derek’s controversial Language Bioprogram hypothesis, something I routinely teach about in my creolistics seminars. I like to think that I helped tip the scales when he was refining it, after I sent him a paper on a creole called Juba Arabic written for me by one of my students, Ushari Ahmad Mahmud, in 1974. While a physical, historical connection could be (and was being) made between Africa, South America and the Pacific Ocean to explain the structural similarities their respective creoles shared, the fact they are also found in Juba Arabic, with which no connection could be made, made it clear that their common characteristics had to be explained in some other way: our ability as humans to generate language when no pre-existing stable model is there for us to imitate once we’re born.
Although we went our separate ways after leaving Britain our paths crossed often, and each time we seemed to pick up where we’d left off, even during the years when I decreolized—my academic and political Romani involvement was taking me far away from Creolistics. On one occasion, when I was visiting Derek and Yvonne when they still lived in Makiki St. in Honolulu I stepped backwards in their small flat onto an owl, a rare Ming Dynasty figurine of jade-inlaid platinum—and broke it. Were Derek and Yvonnne upset? Fighting back the tears, they said that if I sent them a Van Morrison LP, all would be forgiven. I did, and it was. I remember on the same visit following Derek across the city to a Kama’aina Hawaiian party in the middle of the night in a car with a standard shift, something I’d never driven before, in a city I didn’t know then. We made it okay.
I remember our sharing a small place in Greenwich Village for a week before both speaking at a creole conference in New York City. And each morning my trying to keep up with him as he strode forty or more blocks to the venue rather than take the subway. He was rather taller that I was. I remember our sleeping on the beach on St. Thomas and waking up to find the tent surrounded by tracks made by sand crabs. I remember our both being asked to consider a position at Texas, at a linguistics conference in Washington DC, and our both initially saying “no thank you.”
There are a lot of other memories; Derek and Yvonne sitting in the Horse’s Brass, the pub in our home in Texas, our kids swimming in the pool at the house they rented in Austin, the sessions when Derek would try to teach me the finer points of Chomskyan grammar…the long walks we would take while discussing aspects not only of creolization but about the human condition. We shared a skepticism and impatience about many things; one trivial (but surprisingly Trump-like) irritation we shared was the increasing use of “Happy Holidays” as a greeting instead of “Merry Christmas,” not because of any particular religious fervour, but because it was clearly an effort to be PC as well as to extend the season’s marketing prospects. Derek took the Roma struggle very seriously, and on occasion wrote letters protesting evidence of anti-Gypsyism that I’d bring to his attention.
Derek’s greatest achievement, however, was to persuade Vonnie to marry him. She was his wife and anchor over six decades, not only did she raise along with him their highly successful children, but she was able to get him to take up folk-dancing.
I’m going to miss me old buddy.
Ian Hancock
From Ed Klein: In Memory of Derek Bickerton
I am very thankful for this opportunity to write a few words in tribute to my mentor, my boss, and my PhD. chair, Dr. Derek Bickerton. This reflection tells of a very narrow part of this amazing linguist’s professional life. It seems like rather ancient history, given that even I have reached the end of my 44-year teaching career at Hawaii Pacific University and retired last May. This account, then, is bookended by 1970 and 1981, my decade with Derek Bickerton.
Immediately before I entered the Linguistics Department at UH, I had spent 4 years of work in Peace Corps (1966 to 1970), all connected with South Korea. First, I was a Peace Corps Trainee (Hilo), then a Peace Corps Volunteer (Korea), then a Peace Corps Trainer (Hilo), and finally a Peace Corps staff member—a regional representative, again in Korea. Clearly, my background was Peace Corps and Korea when I took residence in Hale Manoa to begin my graduate studies. How did this finally connect me with Derek? I assure you that it does, so please hear me out.
For the first two years of the 1970s under the generous funding of the East West Center, I worked on masters degrees both in linguistics and ESL. (ESL metathesized into ELS a few years ago at UHM.) But in summer 1972, I knew that my two years of East West Center support would soon come to an end. My wife-to-be and I had set a date in October to be married. Now, she not only had a real job with the DOE, but she also had a car and a rented apartment not far from UH. Still, my own self-esteem said I needed to bring home a paycheck.
One day, our wise department chair at that time, Byron Bender, called me into his office and asked me a simple question I shall always remember. “What are you going to do in the coming year?” “Well, maybe I’ll apply to a mainland school to earn a PhD.“ Without skipping a single beat, he retorted, “Why don’t you stay here? I think I can find you some money.” Long story short, he eventually sent me across the hall, and I did a kind of preliminary interview with Derek for some new project called the “Non-Standard Hawaii English Project” Now, at that point, I was a linguistics student with the wisdom gained by successfully navigating three semesters of grad courses, and as a specialty I was one who had a pretty clear idea of how Korean phonology worked and the great historical story of the wonderful Korean alphabet, Hangul, and the complicated system of Korean “levels of politeness,” but truthfully, I wasn’t completely clear on the difference between pidgins and creoles. That bit of ignorance was about to change.
So in fall of 1973, I embarked on a “real linguistics job.” Derek had gathered and hired several students, Bill Peet, Terry Makuakane, Charly Sato, Carol Odo, myself and others and put us through a rigorous sociolinguistics training program. This study was to be a description of Hawaii Pidgin English and Hawaii Creole English and their relationship. Who were speaking these? Where were they being spoken? We learned other important sociolinguistic methods—for example, how to establish a random sample. (In fact, it turned out to be impossible in the Hawaiian situation. Contact me later for the story of that interesting debacle.) We learned to use our tape recorders–both reel- to-reel and cassette tape recorders. We learned tricks for keeping our subjects talking. As a group, we gathered and discussed the various features we would consider in the study–for example, how tense, negation and conditionality are expressed in Hawai`i creole and pidgin. Derek, of course, from his previous work in Guyana, already knew what might very well be the important features, but we actually verified these by going through some preliminary taping sessions to see if it were true.
In brief, all of us student assistants were to work on interviewing probable good subjects. A good subject was a person who sounded local (the more local, the better) and who was willing to give us an hour of time. Our non-threatening topic was “How have you seen Hawai`i change in the last ten years?” We really didn’t care about the answer to that topic; we just wanted them to keep talking! As interviewers, we found subjects not only on `Oahu, but also on the neighbor islands. Terry Makuakane and I, for example, scored a trip to Hana with the project.
Then back in Manoa, we would transcribe the 45-60 minute interviews using the Odo alphabet—a phonetic system which uses only English letters and no diacritics. The work was all done by hand in pencil into marble notebooks on the right side, while on the left side we would later tally the pidgin/creole features we had found examples of. Our rate for just the transcribing (not coding) was presumed to be about “10 or 12 to 1.” That is, if we had an hour-long interview, then we hoped to transcribe it in about 10 to 12 hours. There was not one computer to be found in the project. That part, we were told, had been cut out of the proposal by the NSF, the source of the project funds. If we were to do this project, we were to do it by hand with pencil and paper and our own mathematic/linguistic wits.
We were set up in a couple of rooms in the so-called “temporary buildings” across from the old medical school on the upper UH-Manoa campus. We student assistants each had a desk. There were usually cool breezes from Manoa Valley, but if they failed we had neither air conditioning nor fans. More memorable, however, were the termites. These buildings were heavily infested, and every day we went to work, the automatic first chore was to wipe the termite droppings off the desk, lest your work through that day be contaminated by termite frass (or poop) on your hands, your clothes, and any documents you were working with.
Our student assistant responsibility was to work 10 hours per week on the project. I clearly remember one project meeting in which Derek, in a somewhat scolding manner, suggested that the transcription and coding process was not moving fast enough. “Are we really spending 10 hours a week on the project?” he asked, not really expecting individual answers. Things moved along much faster thereafter. Within the two years of the project, a sufficient number of interviews were recorded and then transcribed, coded, and analyzed. Derek’s responsibility was to do the final analysis and the final project report. These reports were “published” in 1976 and 1977 as a two-volume, 8 ½ X 11 mimeographed work of turgid prose, diagrams, charts, and illustrations. However, it was indeed the most up-to-date report on non-standard Hawaiian English of its kind.
I have not forgotten that I am supposed to connect Derek and my interest in Korean and Korean immigrants. In another part of my life back then I had made friends with Amy Agbayani thru a church connection. I became interested in one of her several endeavors—namely, Operation Manong—a project co-founded by Dr. Agbayani to connect new immigrant students, primarily from the Philippines, to UH student tutors to help the newcomers increase their chances of entering and doing well in post-secondary education here in Hawai`i. However, in some cases, the immigrants at a particular school were not always 100% Filipinos. Nevertheless, these non-Filipinos were not snubbed but were included in the tutorial help along with any Filipinos. I was sent to tutor at Kalakaua Intermediate School, right off Kalihi Street, in which there were indeed many Filipinos, but the second largest immigrant group was Korean. It took only one visitation for me to realize that, yes, the Korea kids sounded like they were from Korea, not the Philippines, but just as obvious was the fact that the non-native English they were speaking was strongly influenced by Hawai`i Creole English, sounding in some ways like the Filipinos, Japanese, and other Pacific islanders in their nascent English. I thought that maybe I had found my dissertation topic since this brought together my interests in second language acquisition, Korean, Koreans, and non-standard English in Hawai`i. With permission from the school, I began to tape some of my sessions with the various Korean students while tutoring at Kalakaua.
Sometime later, I made an appointment with Derek and presented him with a very rough, broad outline of what I thought I wanted to do—a longitudinal study of Korean adolescents learning Hawai`i Creole as well as Standard American English. In a word, he said, “No. This is not what you want as your dissertation topic.” I was crushed. His argument was that adolescent language, whether their first language or their second language, was highly volatile, varying this way and that way, quickly changing depending on which group of peers they last identified with or had just talked to. He predicted that I would fail to find convincing patterns. If I wanted to do some kind of variation study, I should find more stable subjects than kids in middle school.
It was not long after this meeting that much changed. Derek went on Sabbatical. My wife and I had our first child, and I landed a full-time job at Hawaii Pacific College. However, among the dozen or so Koreans I could have followed up on at Kalakaua, there were four boys that I kept in contact with. They were now in high school, but I kept taping them from time to time, and I began to transcribe some of the tapes. I made a handful of presentations about the data that I was finding–locally at the Hawai`i Council of Teachers of English and nationally at TESOL. In all, I continued to follow and tape them for four years, and only stopped when one of my four subjects was tragically killed in a car accident.
Derek returned from South America, and I showed him what I had been doing. Much of this, I thought, showed recognizable and regular “change” in the four boy’s English from HCE to SAE. Much to my surprise, he did not scold me. He actually gave me some good, earnest counsel and suggestions. Did he completely forget our previous conversation? Or was he still thinking that he should let this foolish grad student wallow in his pages and pages of hardly analyzable tokens of non-standard negatives, tense markers, and conditional phrases uttered by some Korean kids from Kalihi until he realizes the futility of the project on his own? No, I think he was now on my side. Thereafter there was never a discouraging word. Perhaps sabbaticals really are wonderful breaks that relax and open the minds of hard working professors and in many ways also benefit the hardworking grad students under them? Through 1979 and 1980 I worked very hard to finish the analysis and the writing of the dissertation while keeping my full-time teaching position at HPC. Derek was very available and totally helpful during this time as I pumped out chapter after chapter. He shepherded me through the penultimate version of the paper and through the meetings with the rest of my committee.
In mid-April of 1981, three life-changing things happened to me and to my family, all in the same week. First, the final draft of my dissertation was accepted by the whole committee. Pushing the deadline, I even had to deliver the copies personally to their homes in some cases. Second, I received notification that I had been granted a Fulbright Professorship to teach a year at Sogang University in Seoul. And third, our third child was born to us. Then in May ’81 my family attended graduation, and Derek, who was not really one for such ceremonies, had actually borrowed regalia from a colleague and “hooded” me on a terribly hot Sunday on the quad. A week or so later, he and Yvonne threw a party at his apartment in my honor.
There are other tales I could tell about my decade with Derek—like his 1976 proposal for an empirical test for developing a “new pidgin” on an uninhabited Pacific island by bringing together for a year several married couples who spoke totally different languages. I was helping him and was close to finding an appropriate Korean couple, but that’s another story for another time.
All of us, particularly those of us in sociolinguistics, owe Derek Bickerton profound gratitude for his long and innovative work in the department. I offer my deepest sympathies to his family upon his passing. May he rest in peace.
Ed Klein, Ph.D.
Hawaii Pacific University
From John Odling-Smee:
I first met Derek at a conference in Barcelona in 2004. I knew about his work on language, but given that I am not a linguist, not much more about him then. I gave a talk on niche construction theory and I was surprised that, immediately after I had given it, Derek came up to me and started talking to me about it. I realised that he had got hold of my theory far more rapidly than most people. I was also surprised and delighted that he liked it so much. He seemed to think it would be relevant to his own work on language, although at that stage I couldn’t understand why.
The second time we met, just over a year later was when my wife Ros and I were travelling back on a working trip from Australia via Hawaii. We stayed with Derek and Yvonne at their lovely house on the coast. They were marvellous hosts, intellectually, gastronomically and recreationally. I like to think we all got on very well with each other and Derek and I certainly achieved a much better understanding of each other’s work at the end of it. After that we stayed in touch and collaborated slightly, although I think not as much as either of us could have wished. It’s with sadness that we have learned of his death now from you, although at a great age and I should imagine after a very fulfilled life. He achieved a lot.
With best wishes and yours sincerely,
John Odling-Smee
Emeritus Fellow,
Mansfield College,
Oxford.
From Manny Drechsel & Terry Makuakane-Drechsel: A Tribute to Derek Bickerton
We take this opportunity first to express our condolences to Yvonne, children and grandchildren for the loss of a life partner, father, and grandfather. Our thoughts are with them, and we hope that recounting our memories can help shed some light about what Derek has meant to us in our lives and perhaps reduce their pain of loss a bit. Reading the postings on how he affected the other contributors’ lives in fact brings back many fond memories of our own with Derek, among which we would like to share both personal and professional experiences.
Teresa “Terry” and I first met Derek at the LSA-sponsored 1973 Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in his lectures on pidgins and creoles. At the time, Terry was an undergraduate student at the University of Hawai‘i-Hilo, and I was a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and we also met each other there for the first time. Not only did Derek inspire us with his challenging lectures on pidgins and creoles, convincing me to pursue a similar track of study; he also brought Terry and me together. Six years after our first meeting in Michigan, Terry and I married at Ha‘ikū Gardens in Kāne‘ohe on windward O‘ahu in the presence of Derek and Yvonne, among others. I am not sure whether Derek ever realized his role in that aspect of our lives.
He also had a big influence on our future academic pursuits and early professional lives. After that “fateful” summer, Derek hired Terry as a student researcher from Fall 1973 through Spring 1975 to work on his NSF-funded “Non-Standard Hawaiian English Project” (NSHEP). While still attending UH-Hilo, she worked with his graduate student, Karen Neff, who lived on the Big Island, and together they interviewed “pidgin and creole” speakers throughout Hawai`i Island. After Terry transferred to UH-Mānoa in Spring 1974, she continued to work on his NSHEP project, while completing her B.A. in linguistics. Academically and professionally, Terry could not have had a better preparation and opportunities than with NSHEP, including experiences of working alongside Derek and inspirational graduate students like Bill Peet, Carol Odo, Ed Klein, and Charlene Sato. Other NSHEP “informants” like Lei and Brownie Abordo opened the door to new areas of pidgin and creole studies that had never been explored in-depth before, e.g. a “Non-Standard Hawaiian English” sign language. Lei had a brother who was born deaf, so the two siblings communicated with each other and others in the Hawai‘i deaf community through a unique pidgin form of sign language, significantly different from ASL and possibly infused by the Hawaiian language. Terry recalls that Lei and her brother could immediately identify people who were or were not “native speakers of their language.”
As Ed Klein has recounted in his tribute, Derek was bold in his proposals to recreate “pidgin and creole” social situations, like bringing together married native speakers of diverse languages to live on an isolated island. He seemed more intrigued about what language(s) their children would speak as a result of this linguistic experiment. Another such experiment was the “hypno-linguistics” project in 1975, which involved Terry, her older sister, and father. The idea was to hypnotize the subjects and to use age-regression to take them back to their childhood and record their speech of that earlier stage of development. While Derek was not able to carry out the controversial isolated island proposal, he did successfully carry out a pilot project of hypno-linguistics with Terry and her family. Terry remembers one of her professors at the University of Michigan, where in Fall 1975 she returned for a graduate degree in linguistics, making unflattering remarks about Derek’s “experiments;” yet this same person also spoke in awe of his ground-breaking work in pidgin and creole studies. Terry has always remained proud and grateful to have worked with Derek on NSHED. She especially appreciated his encouragement and support to pursue a career outside of linguistics after she completed the M.A. at Michigan. Almost 20 years later, after Terry got her doctorate in education leadership, she was able to acknowledge Derek publicly at a UH-College of Arts and Sciences presentation for his academic and professional influences on her. Hali‘a aloha e Derek!
I never was a formal student of Derek’s, although in Fall 1974 I too worked for Derek on his project “Non-Standard Hawaiian English Project” and addressed issues of ethnographic description. When Terry transferred to UH-Mānoa in Spring 1974, I joined her for a semester in Fall of that year – returning to Wisconsin in Spring 1975 to complete an M.A. in linguistics and a Ph.D. in anthropology with a focus on anthropological linguistics in Spring 1979. Even after I had returned to Wisconsin, I regularly consulted with Derek. He always welcomed inquiries about pidgin and creole languages and linguistic analysis. There is one scene that I still remember distinctly – we were at a beautiful beach on windward O‘ahu in the mid-1970s, with Derek and Bill Labov, when they got into a spirited discussion about the advantages of the continuum analysis, including implicational scaling, over variable rules. Derek clearly made the case against the variable rule and for implicational scaling, although to my disappointment he never showed much interest in the sociocultural domain of linguistic variation – a deficiency that in my mind we could address by systematic observations based on the ethnography of speaking, as promoted by Dell Hymes and John Gumperz. Over the years, I have however come to appreciate the continuum analysis as preferable to conventional dialectological analysis in dialect ranges other than decreolization continua.
In hindsight, more significant to me than Derek’s variationist analysis or his many other contributions to pidgin and creole studies was his unconditional support of my doctoral research on Mobilian Jargon or the Chickasaw-Choctaw trade language, a Muskogean-based pidgin of the lower Mississippi River valley, in the mid-1970s. By no means could I take such support for granted at the time. Except for those familiar with Chinook Jargon of northwestern North America, most Americanist linguists showed surprisingly little interest in linguistic convergence, let alone pidginization. On the other hand, most creolists at the time did not show any more interest in non-European pidgins unless they were of African origin or reflected characteristics of an African substratum. Refreshingly, Derek never expressed any such presumptions towards my doctoral project, and as he was never shy about sharing his opinion, I can also conclude with confidence that he never held such ideas, at least during the years when I knew him. Derek indeed was among the very first to address the question of a Hawaiian-based pidgin preceding Pidgin English for the Hawaiian Islands (see his essay entitled “Pidgin Hawaiian” and coauthored with Pila Wilson in Pidgin and Creoles Languages: Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke, ed. by Glenn G. Gilbert) and then to sponsor our mutual student [S.]J.M. Roberts in a project on the same topic (see e.g. “Pidgin Hawaiian: A Sociohistorical Study.” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 10 (1995): 1-56). Derek’s research of pidgins and creoles, including his notion of cultural blinders from his book Bastard Tongues, also inspired my own recent book on Maritime Polynesian Pidgin, a regional Polynesian-based pidgin in the eastern Pacific during the first hundred years of European contact.
There is so much to be grateful to Derek for – and not the least also to Yvonne, who has always struck us as the pillar in their mutual relationship. Mahalo nui loa to both; and rest in peace, Derek!
Aloha,
Emanuel “Manny” Drechsel & Teresa “Terry” Makuakane-Drechsel
From Kauanoe Kamanā and William Wilson
We received news here in Hilo from Manny Drechsel about the passing of Derek. So sad to hear about this.
E hele ʻo ia me ka maikaʻi,
Ma ke ala polohiwa a Kāne;
E hele ʻo ia me ka maluhia;
E hele nō me ka palekana;
ʻO kāna ma kēlā ʻaoʻao ma ʻō,
ʻO ka launa me nā kupa o ka ʻāina,
ʻO ka poʻe āna i hāpai ai a hanohano;
Hanohano pū ʻo Hawaiʻi lau lāhui,
Hui like, walaʻau like, aloha like;
Aloha wale ka ʻohana me kākou like ē;
Ua hala ia kumu, ia hoahana, ia hoaaloha nui ē.
May his journey be blessed,
Along the pathway of Kāne;
May his journey be peaceful;
May it be taken in safety;
When he reaches that destination beyond our world,
May he enjoy interaction with the people of islands,
Those whom he raised up for recognition;
Recognition that also came to Hawaiʻi, land of many peoples,
Gathering together, chatting together; loving each other;
Such feelings of aloha for his family and for all of us as well;
We have lost our teacher, our fellow worker, our great friend.
We remember Derek for his great aloha for the people of Hawaiʻi. He was a champion of the people out in the communities, people who were sometimes seen as overly ordinary. If we are not mistaken, he too was a bit of an underdog hired with only the M.A. He was such a fun person to be around. Never pretentious, a guy who enjoyed a joke and sometimes shocking you a bit too.
Derek greatly encouraged us in our pursuit of Hawaiian and Hawaiian language revitalization. Kauanoe was recruited into linguistics by Derek and hired by him to serve as the Hawaiian language expert in his multilingual team investigating the contributions of different languages to Hawaiʻi Pidgin English and Hawaiʻi Creole English. When Bill showed Derek examples of broken Hawaiian from an older Hawaiian publication, Derek mentored and supported him as a coauthor with Derek for an article that first surfaced Pidginized Hawaiian to linguists. Derek believed that the role of Hawaiian had been underplayed in descriptions of the history of Hawaiʻi Creole English. He supported continued research into that history by such people as Sarah Roberts and Manny Drechsel who have enriched the initial material collected during his project with Kauanoe.
Derek’s focus on collecting data tied in well with our efforts as students to learn Hawaiian from interacting with the remaining Hawaiian speaking kūpuna. His overall perspective on the value of community people was an important part in changing attitudes in Hawaiʻi that helped us establish our Hawaiian language revitalization efforts at UH Hilo and also the Pūnana Leo preschools. We built our programs to levels of national prominence using people who had otherwise been seen as unqualified. We also changed the way Hawaiian was taught from being seen from the perspective of Standard English to connecting it to the everyday local culture and language of our students. To this day, university Hawaiian language students in our classes are required to make connections between Hawaiian and Pidgin and translate between the two languages. This was simply an application of Derek’s methodologies.
Our perspective on multilingualism as a component of Hawaiian identity and local identity as a whole was very much nurtured through our relationship with Derek and the work that he led. He supported our efforts to reestablish Hawaiian speaking homes and a full Hawaiian medium school system. We think he would be pleased to see all students in our P-12 Hawaiian medium laboratory school site Nāwahīokalaniʻōpuʻu honoring their immigrant ancestors through required study of heritage languages and using Pidgin as well in required interviews of family members in that language.
Derek Bickerton was very important person in our own personal history and that of the larger efforts in which we have been involved. We acknowledge his contributions on an individual level, a program level, and a community level. Mahalo nui e ka ʻohana no kā Derek hana. E hele ʻo ia me ka maikaʻi ma ke ala polohiwa a Kāne.
Me ke aloha,
Kauanoe Kamanā and William Wilson
From the Wailua Public Library
In 1972, after the adventure of living in a number of countries across four continents, Derek and his family settled in Honolulu, where for 24 years he taught linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa while he and his wife Yvonne finished raising their three children (all three becoming successful in their own fields of law, dance and contemporary art). Eventually, he retired from teaching to write full-time, so he and Yvonne built a home in our lovely town of Waialua and moved to the North Shore. As avid readers, they became both participants in and supporters of our Waialua Library community and its many activities.
Born in Cheshire, England and educated at Cambridge University, Derek spent most of his live researching, writing about, and contributing to our understanding of the development of human language. His work studying creole languages in places like Guyana and Hawai‘i led him to theorize that humans possess an innate capacity for grammar that is revealed in the similarities among the various creoles spoken around the world. He referred to himself as a “street linguist,” stressing the importance of field work to his research, which benefitted from, in his words, a “total lack of respect for the respectable.” Some of this work formed the basis of his Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1984.
But Derek was also a published writer of books. After authoring the novel Tropicana in 1963, he spent most of his writing life sharing his revolutionary ideas on the roots of language, beginning with Dynamics of a Creole System in 1975 through to his most recent work, More Than Nature Needs: Language, Mind and Evolution, published by Harvard University Press in 2014.
In 2008, Derek produced a fascinating memoir of his life and work entitled Bastard Tongues, which was read and discussed by our Book Club/Readers’ Group the following year. Derek was an active member of that group and, with his dry humor, his sharp intellect, his global perspective and his resulting skepticism regarding the glories of our modern culture, he enlivened and broadened our monthly Book Club discussions for many years.
Naturally, as a successful writer and experienced teacher, Derek was imposed upon and generously agreed to organize and instruct our very first Writers’ Group—at that time a collection of enthusiastic amateurs without much of a clue. His patience and no-nonsense approach to telling a story clearly and concisely helped all of us to become better writers. The Writers’ Group thrives to this day as a result of his influence.
And, of course, until just recently, Derek was still devouring books selected for him by Yvonne at our monthly book sales. Some good habits do last a lifetime.
We have been so very fortunate to have had Derek as a friend and neighbor. We are a richer community thanks to his years of contribution since we have all, in one way or another, become the beneficiaries of his belief in and support of one of our most valuable community resources, our public library. We are grateful, Derek, that your many adventures brought you here.
Barbara Byrnes
From Mariana Maduell
Derek was a unique individual. I had originally decided to go to UH to work on pidgins and creoles, but he was away for my first year there, and I moved into other areas of investigation. I only did one course with him during my whole time there.
We became friends through his wife Yvonne, who joined my Spanish dance company in 1990, while I was writing my dissertation on some linguistic aspects of flamenco performance. From the company’s first performance on, he was always extremely supportive of us and generous towards me personally.
The last time I saw Derek was one summer when their daughter, also a friend of mine, was in Austin to teach in the summer session for the American Ballet Theatre. They came for a few weeks, and we had the opportunity to get together a few very special times. He gave me a copy of his new book, Bastard Tongues, which I immediately began reading.
Yvonne had told me in a phone call early this year that he was really unwell, but I hoped he would rally. It was not to be; he will be missed.
Mariana Maduell
Memorial Essay by Emanuel J. Drechsel
(to appear in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, reproduced here with the permission of John Benjamins Publishing Company)
In Memory of Derek Bickerton (1926-2018)
On 5 March 2018, Derek Bickerton, distinguished creolist and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, passed away at his home in Waialua on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, three weeks before his 92nd birthday. He is survived by his wife Yvonne, his sons Jim and Ashley, his daughter Julie, and seven grandchildren.
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Born in Cheshire, England, on 25 March 1926, Bickerton originally studied English literature at Cambridge University after World War II to pursue his passion of writing poetry and fiction over the years (for an early list of his novels, see Byrne 1991: 11; for some of his poems, see Bickerton 2014b). He came to linguistics only in the 1960s; but he did so by a calling, as he described in his book Bastard Tongues (Bickerton 2008: 5-6) – a personal, witty, and often irreverent account of his professional development and his scholarly explorations of creole languages.<1>
Ironically, Derek had loathed issues of grammar until he became interested in questions of how children acquired language. Following his first academic appointment as lecturer in modern English at the University College of Cape Coast, Ghana, from 1964 through 1966, he engaged in a year’s postgraduate work in linguistics at the University of Leeds (Bickerton 2008: 3-10; Byrne 1991: 1-2). Owing to his experiences in teaching and writing English as a second language in Africa and subsequently in the Caribbean, Bickerton developed a growing interest in their local dialects, including creoles. From 1967 to 1971, he took on the position of senior lecturer in English and linguistics at the University of Guyana, where he came to deliberate about the analysis of highly variable, wide-ranging Guyanese Creole. His participation at the first international conference on creole languages at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, in April 1968 then opened up two main avenues of arguments for him: (1) David DeCamp’s analysis of “post-creole continuum” in Jamaica analogous to what Derek had similarly found in Guyana and (2) Douglas Taylor’s presentation of striking structural parallels between the Portuguese-based creole São Tomense off West Africa and the French-based creole Lesser Antillean off northern South America, for which he however could not find any evidence of common origin or historical contact (Bickerton 2008: 17-32). On his return trip to Guyana, Derek also familiarized himself with Palenquero as an example of Creole Spanish in Colombia. Although he did not find much of its original pattern, he would pursue its study again (Bickerton 2008: 49-62).
After four years in Guyana, Bickerton spent the final year as lecturer in linguistics at the University of Lancaster as part of what had been a five-year package, including his appointment at the University of Guyana. In 1972, he joined the Linguistics Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa at the rank of associate professor, with the objective of pursuing research on Hawai‘i Pidgin-Creole English and defining features of this Pacific creole in contrast to Atlantic creoles (Bickerton 2008: 63-76). In the meantime, Derek had attracted attention with his multi-level study of Guyanese Creole consistent with David DeCamp’s post-creole continuum analysis. His book Dynamics of a Creole System (1975) established him as a prominent variationist of decreolization continua by implicational scaling as illustrated for Guyana, but applicable to Caribbean islands such as Jamaica as well. On the basis of his book, Cambridge University awarded a Ph.D. in linguistics to Derek, despite the fact that he had not gone through a conventional graduate-school education. His doctorate also brought about a promotion to full professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 1976 (Bickerton 2008: 77-95).
During these years, Bickerton was gaining recognition as a leading creolist. He identified semantactic parallels between Hawai‘i Creole English, Guyanese Creole and other Caribbean creoles (as in their tense-modality-aspect systems as well as the use of definite and indefinite articles) that he could not justifiably explain in terms of a simple historical model such as common origin or diffusion and that required an alternative explanation (Bickerton 2008: 97-109; for a description of Hawai‘i Pidgin-Creole English in particular, see Bickerton 1976-77). To account for these typological patterns, Derek turned to common processes of second-language learning and first-language acquisition among descendants of slaves and indentured laborers in plantation communities. He consequently proposed a creolization model based on a language bioprogram by which children in creole-speaking societies acquired fundamentally the same grammatical patterns irrespective of their pidgin sources by using universal mental templates. To explore his ideas, Derek came to push the boundaries of comparative creole studies in new, unconventional ways. In 1975, he carried out a pilot project of hypnolinguistics, in which three members of a Hawai‘i Creole English-speaking family – father and two daughters – submitted together to age regression by a professional psychologist. Derek hoped for their joint hypnosis to reveal not only the Creole speakers’ earlier stages of language development, but also characteristics of earlier varieties of Hawai‘i Creole English. To my knowledge, he did not continue this project or publish any findings from it. Hypnolinguistics could not reasonably provide linguistic data at a sufficient historical time depth in light of the comparatively short history of Hawai‘i Creole English in contrast with Caribbean creoles (see Bickerton 2008: 97-109). Instead, he subsequently proposed to test his theory in an experiment by isolating several monolingual families of highly diverse linguistic backgrounds in a multilingual community on a Pacific Island and studying their interlingual developments in the form of adults’ pidgins and children’s creoles. In the end, this so-called “Island Experiment” did not come to fruition, as it failed to receive funding under its originally proposed arrangement due to concerns about the subjects’ safety and psychological well-being (Bickerton 2008: 109-139; see also Thomas [Talmy] Givón in O’Grady 2018). Eventually, Derek however found further confirmation of his universalist analysis in the linguistic research by his student Francis Byrne on Saramaccan, a creole spoken by maroons in the interior of Suriname (Byrne 1987).
Exposure to Hawai‘i Pidgin-Creole English literally “radicalized” Bickerton’s thinking about pidgins and creoles in the sense of making him reflect about the deepest, human roots of the latter. During his years in the Hawaiian Islands, he helped transform pidgin and creole studies into a respectable subfield within linguistics with an emphasis on grammar and history. Like few creolists, Derek dared to challenge the boundaries of conventional linguistic and behavioral-science thinking by raising long-neglected, controversial questions on the origins of language and fresh ideas of language and humanity. In Roots of Language (Bickerton 1981), he explored not only how creole languages developed, but also what creolization revealed about processes of language acquisition and, by extension, about the origin of human language in an integrated model, as he elaborated in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Bickerton 1984; see also Bickerton 2008: 140-149). Roots widely shaped a long-neglected discussion on language origin within linguistics, and received broad attention beyond the discipline – almost 35 years later, it would be republished as a classic with a new preface addressing questions about its shortcomings and pointing out its assets (Bickerton 2016). At variance with conventional models of pidginization and creolization, Derek moreover relocated the historically significant stage of such radical creolization from an early establishment phase to a later expansion phase in his own thinking, as illustrated by linguistic and historical evidence for Hawai‘i Pidgin-Creole English (see Bickerton 2008: 151-167). Increasingly, he came to recognize the significance of and the need for in-depth historical research, including questions of economics and demography, as he argued for his analysis of Suriname, Mauritius and the Seychelles. The creoles spoken on the islands in the Indian Ocean proved an unexpected source of serial-verb constructions, reportedly not recognized before. Besides, these constructions lacked any historical models among local languages, thus serving as additional evidence in support of his language-bioprogram hypothesis (Bickerton 2008: 169-207).
Over the years, Bickerton (2008: 81, 152, 189, 212) developed some Sitzfleisch – his use of German ‘sitting flesh’ with the implication of ‘the ability to sit still’ or ‘persistence, perseverance’ – for the pursuit of archival research, although he did not acquire great enthusiasm for it. The case in point again was the Hawaiian Islands with their fairly rich historical documents and a rudimentary tradition of philological research. With his conception of hapa haole ‘half foreigner’ or a makeshift medium of Hawaiian and English in the 1830s and 1840s, the early-twentieth-century creolist John E. Reinecke (1969: 34-38, 87-92, 102, fn. 20, 109-110) in Language and Dialect in Hawaiihad already anticipated what we have since come to accept as Pidgin Hawaiian (Bickerton 1976-77: I.1-19; Bickerton and Wilson 1987: 62; Day 1987: 167), although initially he showed some reluctance to admit so (see Bickerton and Wilson 1987: 61, 69, 74-75). Richard R. Day (1987) similarly argued for a Hawaiian Maritime Pidgin with Hawaiian as the major source, which Bickerton and William H. Wilson (1987) characterized as pidginized Hawaiian or ‘ōlelo pa‘i‘ai, the Hawaiian name for ‘pidgin’, whether the Hawaiian- or English-based variety, literally meaning ‘pounded but undiluted taro speech’ or ‘hard-taro speech.’ Significantly, Derek however was the first to recognize the historical role and sociolinguistic significance of a Hawaiian-based pidgin preceding Pidgin English and then to sponsor our mutual student Sarah Roberts in a project on the same topic, when in the 1990s I had an opportunity to collaborate with Derek as a faculty member of the University of Hawai‘i. With her in-depth philological and historical studies of Hawaiian court records, Roberts (1995a; 1995b; 2005: 51-128; 2013) has since confirmed the existence and persistence of Pidgin Hawaiian in the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century on a systematic scale, an argument subsequently extended in geographic distribution to the eastern Pacific at large for Maritime Polynesian Pidgin (Drechsel 2014). Moreover, this research has reopened philology in a historical context as an alternative methodological resource (see Bickerton 2008: espec. 209-229), still in need of full acknowledgment in creole studies until today (see Baker and Winer 1999).
In recognizing the significance of ‘ōlelo pa‘i‘ai and hapa haole in the Hawaiian Islands before Pidgin-Creole English, Derek noticed that different varieties reflected the pidgin speakers’ first-language influences of in terms of their recollections and personal preferences. In contrast to English sources, Hawaiian documents (including early court records) have thus illustrated a much more Hawaiianized ‘ōlelo pa‘i‘ai or hapa haole; they suggest not only that early Europeans “bleached” their attestations of Hawai‘i Pidgin English of Polynesian influences because of their ignorance in recording Hawaiian or other “foreign” words, but also that Hawaiians, other Polynesians and Pacific Islanders had played a more significant role in the Pidgin’s original development than is evident from recent historical data or is conventionally recognized. By his notion of cultural blinder, Derek lends a most useful concept for understanding sociolinguistic variation in historical contexts by recognizing the significance of non-European contact languages, whose historical role has long remained underestimated, if not outright ignored, in creole studies (see Bickerton 2008: 212-213). After the mid-nineteenth century, the Hawaiian Islands came under growing influence of Americans in quest of political power in the region as well as a rapid influx of various communities of indentured plantation laborers, foremost Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos among others, with diverse linguistic and social traditions. According to Derek, these sociolinguistic and sociohistorical conditions eventually led to the radical creolization of a highly variable Pidgin English by children at its expansion phase at the century’s turn. Similar sociolinguistic dynamics reportedly applied to the Caribbean, and brought about typologically matching linguistic patterns in Atlantic creoles notwithstanding some sociolinguistic and sociohistorical differences between the Caribbean and the Hawaiian Islands (Bickerton 2008: 209-229).
Bickerton clearly understood creolization in radical creoles and comparable sociolinguistic situations not primarily as the result of second-language learning, but rather as a process of language acquisition: Children regularly recreate original human language – a point for which he found further corroboration in the serial-verb constructions of the Nicaraguan Sign Language by deaf children in yet another case of a spontaneous language creation. Drawing on his experiences with Palenquero of Columbia for both positive and negative inspiration, Derek redefined an outline of the so-called “Island Experiment” in the hope that somebody else would resume it to demonstrate or disprove his language-bioprogram model (Bickerton 2008: 232-247).
Bickerton’s own research for Language and Species (1990) had meanwhile broadened in scope and grown in time depth. His goal was to reconstruct a proto-language for Homo erectus by drawing on “living linguistic fossils” such as reduced pidgin languages, the “two-word” stage of small children, and “ape talk” within the context of paleoanthropologists’ findings. He explained how such a protolanguage provided a novel ecological niche to Homo erectus and how it could eventually have emerged into the first full-fledged language of modern humans. Reversing conventional wisdom of the behavioral sciences about the human species as having grown intelligent to invent language, Derek in Language and Human Behavior (Bickerton 1995) postulated the species “as blundering into language and, as a direct result of that, becoming clever” (Bickerton 1995: 40). In particular, he argued for each feature of human intelligence and consciousness as distinct from animal cognition to have derived from properties of language. Accordingly, language evolved as a representational system rather than as a means of communication or a skill. In evolutionary terms, intelligence too was not so much a case of problem solving as rather a matter of maintaining homeostasis, i.e. an organism’s preservation of optimal achievable conditions for survival and well-being. Whereas nonhumans practice “on-line thinking” for homeostasis, humans can also engage in off-line thinking; “only humans can assemble fragments of information to form a pattern that they can later act upon without having to wait on that great but unpunctual teacher, experience” (Bickerton 1995: 59). This very power “enables us to change our behavior, or invent vast ranges of new behavior, practically overnight, with no concomitant genetic changes” (Bickerton 1995: 65).
In Adam’s Tongue (Bickerton 2009), Derek turned for further evolutionary explanation to niche construction, namely the process by which an organism modifies its own niche or the local environment of another species with physical changes or moves to a new habitat. In other words, inhabitants help create new environments by actively selecting certain traits rather than being selected passively. According to Bickerton, the key to our understanding in the emergence of language is territory scavenging as a newly created proto-human niche, which he understood as a single, most significant factor in the evolution of language in place of previously recognized functions as attested for various animal species (such as hunting, tool making, social relations, rituals, and others). In More than Nature Needs (Bickerton 2014a), Derek addressed the question of the human mind as an evolutionary adaptation, specifically how humans could acquire cognitive capacities far beyond the evolutionary requirements necessary for the survival of a hunting-and-gathering primate ancestor, at the cost of greater demands on the brain’s resources. The answer to this so-called Wallace problem (named after Charles Darwin’s contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution) had been “divine exceptions” to natural selection. Darwin had on the other hand speculated the use of language to mold the brains of our ancestors without any supporting evidence. Steering clear of problems of circular reasoning and relying on findings of modern biology and cognitive science, Derek proposed three fairly distinct phases of language evolution with the first two initiated by biological changes and the third one coming about by cultural changes. Accordingly, the first stage had involved gradual changes from animal communication to proto-language, consisting of a massive repertoire of individual words, which possibly occurred in short sequences, but without any syntactic organization. Derek attributed the vocabulary’s growth to off-line thinking or displacement in new niches such as scenarios of territorial scavenging, thus breaking binding constraints on both communications and thought restraints of here and now. Over time, the pre-human brain had reorganized itself to store and to process new input in the form of words; but significantly pre-humans had retained conscious access to the words. Derek considered as inevitable consequence a cognitive engine capable of merging words and thoughts into meaningful combinations. At the third stage, language had emerged with an early grammar, permitting pre-humans subsequently to tinker with a medium suboptimal for hearers and in need of improvement. This multi-stage model permitted Derek to transcend both nativist thesis and empiricist antithesis with a novel synthesis and in an organized fashion of how language could have come about.
* * *
As an individual, Bickerton, too, was a unique character. He “relished disagreement and controversy, recognizing turmoil at the cost of moving forward,” as William O’Grady (2018: Introduction) has observed. Interactions with Derek could sometimes prove an intimidating experience for students not used to a spirited argument, until they came to appreciate that his intention was to challenge them rather than to frighten them. Those colleagues who came to disagree with Derek – be it about the history of pidgins and creoles, his language-bioprogram hypothesis in particular, or his model of language evolution – have regularly recognized him for inspiring them to pursue more thorough research in order to respond to his claims and thus become better all-round scholars (see, e.g., Escure et al. 2003<2>). He also had a true heart for creole communities, and regularly championed their causes against the establishment and, if necessary, against exclusive academia, which he used as a convenient introductory topic of conversation in his fieldwork. Derek indeed proved quite successful at sociolinguistic fieldwork, even when his marked British accent and ways of speaking distinguished him noticeably from creole speakers (see, e.g., Bickerton 2008: 89-93). He considered himself a “street linguist,” and like William Labov recognized the central significance of fieldwork in his research as “opposed to ‘closet linguists’ who worked mainly in their own heads” (Bickerton 2008: 46). Still, Derek could not identify philosophically with Labov’s variationism, and regularly rejected his description and analysis of linguistic variation by variable rule. Not only did it first require one to organize speakers into classes by social factors instead of linguistic variables, which to Derek meant putting the cart before the horse; but it proved wholly inadequate in accounting for the wide range of linguistic variation in a creole continuum (Bickerton 2008: 44-47). He ultimately distinguished himself from the sociolinguistically oriented variationists by grand and bold ideas inspired by linguistics and beyond in a truly interdisciplinary fashion. As “a lifelong autodidact” (Bickerton 2008: 10), Derek maintained a “fierce independence” and “relentless audacity” (Robert Blust and Thomas [Talmy] Givón in O’Grady 2018) in his arguments and ideas.
* * *
Creole studies, linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology have lost a major, innovative and creative thinker. Mahalo nui loa to Derek Bickerton for all his contributions! May he rest in peace from his long, adventurous journey in search of the human mind by way of “bastard languages,” which have proved anything but bastardly after all!
Footnotes
[1] This book serves as a convenient source of autobiographical information, to which I refer again below.
I first met Derek while attending the 1973 Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan in the summer of 1973 as a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. When visiting the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in the Summer and Fall of 1974, I had opportunities to work on his project “Non-Standard Hawaiian English Project,” addressing issues of ethnographic description, and came to appreciate his variationist, polygeneticist position, ranging from continuum analysis, including implicational scaling as a replacement of traditional dialectological analyses, to his universalist arguments for explaining typological parallels between Caribbean creoles and Hawai‘i Creole English. In subsequent years, I repeatedly consulted Derek for analysis in my doctoral research on Mobilian Jargon or the Chickasaw-Choctaw trade language, a Muskogean-based pidgin of the lower Mississippi River valley (Drechsel 1997). Although I was not a formal student of his, he always welcomed me raising challenging problems of linguistic analysis such as Mobilian Jargon’s highly unusual word order of basic of OSV, which are explainable in Western Muskogean substrate terms. I have moreover valued his unconditional support of my doctoral research on Mobilian Jargon, which I could not take for granted at the time. On the one hand, Americanist linguists other than those already familiar with Chinook Jargon of northwestern North America generally showed surprisingly little interest in linguistic convergence, let alone pidginization, in Native American languages at the time; on the other, most creolists then did not express any more curiosity about non-European pidgins unless they were of African origin or reflected features of an African substratum (see Buchstaller et al. 2014). Refreshingly, Derek did not voice any such presumptions towards my doctoral project, although he was never shy about expressing his critical opinion.
My tribute to Derek inevitably reflects my own experiences in the Hawaiian Islands and the Pacific and ultimately with non-European instances of pidginization. This focus is not without substance here, for it lent the foundation for Derek’s own global comparative foundation in pidgin and creole studies and ultimately his language-bioprogram hypothesis, in which a preceding Pidgin Hawaiian remained an important sociolinguistic building block, however faint and indistinct in today’s history (see below). Indeed, I would argue that it now is inconceivable for Derek to have come up with a similar model of creolization without the intensive study of Hawai‘i Pidgin-Creole English that did not include Pidgin Hawaiian in its preceding history as well. Accordingly, I pay somewhat less attention to Derek’s language-evolution studies later in his life, although this topic too had originally received inspiration from the study of radical creoles such as Guyanese Creole and Hawai‘i Creole English; it will undoubtedly receive its due attention in journals with a focus on human evolution.
In writing this obituary, I gratefully acknowledge Yvonne Bickerton, my wife Teresa H. Makuakāne-Drechsel, William O’Grady, and Sarah Roberts for their corrections of facts as well as editorial suggestions.
2 To my knowledge, these four presentations recognizing Derek’s contributions to creole studies have however not appeared as a package beyond the form of abstracts.
References
Baker, Philip, and Lise Winer. 1999. Separating the Wheat from the Chaff. How Far Can We Rely on Old Pidgin and Creole Texts? St. Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles: The Texts of Samuel Augustus Mathews in Perspective, ed. by Philip Baker and Adrienne Bruyn. London: University of Westminster Press, 103-122
Bickerton, Derek. 1975. Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
_____. 1976-77. Change and Variation in Hawaiian English: Final Report on National Science Foundation Grant No. GS-39748. Vol. 1: General Phonology and Pidgin Syntax (with Carol Odo); Vol. 2: Creole Syntax. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Social Sciences and Linguistics Institute
_____. 1981. Roots of Language. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers
_____. 1984. The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7: 173-188
_____. 1990. Language and Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
_____. 1995. Language and Human Behavior. Seattle: University of Washington Press
_____. 2008. Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowliest Languages. New York: Hill and Wang
_____. 2009. Adam’s Tongues: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. New York: Hill and Wang
_____. 2014a. More than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
_____. 2014b. 25 Poems on Death and Love. San Bernandino, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
_____. 2016. Roots of Language. Republication of the 1981 edition with a new preface by the author. (Classics in Linguistics 3.) Berlin: Language Science Press.
Bickerton, Derek, and William H. Wilson. 1987. Pidgin Hawaiian. Pidgin and Creoles Languages: Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke, ed. by Glenn G. Gilbert. Honolulu, University of Hawai‘i Press, 61-76
Buchstaller, Isabelle, Anders Holmberg, and Mohammad Almoaily (eds.). 2014. Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe Encounters. (Creole Language Library Vol. 47.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Byrne, Francis. 1987. Grammatical Relations in a Radical Creole: Verb Complementation in Saramaccan. (Creole Language Library No. 3.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
_____. 1991. Introduction: Innovation and Excellence within a Scholarly Tradition. Development and Structures of Creole Languages: Essays in Honor of Derek Bickerton, ed. by Francis Byrne and Thom Huebner. (Creole Language Library No. 9.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1-14
Day, Richard R. 1987. Early Pidginization in Hawaii. Pidgin and Creole Languages: Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke, ed. by Glenn G. Gilbert. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 163-176
Drechsel, Emanuel J. 1997. Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic and Sociohistorical Aspects of a Native American Pidgin. (Oxford Studies in Language Contact.) Oxford: Clarendon Press
_____. 2014. Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English. (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Escure, Genviève, Salikoko S. Mufwene, John Schumann, and John Victor Singler. 2003. Colloquium on Derek Bickerton’s Contribution to Creolistics and Related Fields. Summer Conference, 14-17 August 2003, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Honolulu: Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (abstracts) at http://www.hawaii.edu/spcl03/abstracts-colloquium.htm, 23 February 2019
O’Grady, William (ed.). 2018. Derek Bickerton Memorial Page. Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa at http://ling.hawaii.edu/bickerton-memorial-page/, 8 December 2018
Reinecke, John E. 1969. Language and Dialect in Hawaii: A Sociolinguistic History to 1935, ed. by Stanley M. Tsuzaki. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press
Roberts, [S.]J.M. 1995a. Pidgin Hawaiian: A Sociohistorical Study. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 10: 1-56
__________. 1995b. A Structural Sketch of Pidgin Hawaiian. Amsterdam Creole Studies 12: 97-126
Roberts, Sarah J. 2005. The Emergence of Hawai‘i Creole English in the Early 20th Century: The Sociohistorical Context of Creole Genesis. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services
__________. 2013. Pidgin Hawaiian. The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Vol. III: Contact Languages Based on Languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, ed. by. Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 119-127
Emanuel J. Drechsel, Professor (retired)
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