Put speakers of a dozen mutually unintelligible languages on a plantation with no shared tongue, and within a generation their children will have invented, from a grammarless pidgin, a full creole language with tense, aspect, and recursive syntax nobody taught them. Derek Bickerton called this the strongest evidence for an innate language faculty ever produced by accident. This course studies creole genesis as a real-time window onto grammar being built from nothing.
IACSInt'l Academy for Consciousness Studies