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‘Me Tarzan, you Jane!’ Adequacy, expressiveness, and the creole speaker1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

John R. Rickford
John R. Rickford
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

Although linguists like to claim that all human languages are equal in a general sense, differing from systems of animal communication in possessing ‘design features’ like arbitrariness and productivity (Hockett, 1958), they sometimes join non-linguists in expressing the view that some languages are inadequate with respect to the cognitive or expressive resources which they offer their speakers. In the Middle Ages, this charge was commonly levelled against the European vernaculars, and it was sometime before Spanish and Italian were recognized as having autonomous grammatical and lexical resources comparable in regularity and power to classical Greek and Latin (Scaglione, 1984). By the middle of the twentieth century, following on the descriptive work of Boas, Sapir and others, the notion that the languages of ‘primitive’ peoples were fundamentally inadequate had also been eroded, at least in linguistics, anthropology, and other academic circles (Kay & Kempton, 1984:65). Yet, as Hall (1966:106) notes, there is still one group of languages which constitutes the ‘last refuge’ of the concept of inadequate grammatical or lexical resources: pidgins and creoles.

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Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , September 1986 , pp. 281 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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