PART ONE : Please write a 600 word essay about bilingualism. Read Spolsky and Saunders, these two required reading texts are attached to this assignment. Answer in an essay form or individually the following questions. Feel free to use your own ideas and research.
1. Summarize the excerpt by Saunders and Spolsky.
2. In Saunders would any of the definitions consider some who has learned a foreign language at school a bilingual? Is it useful to do so?
3. How might you determine if someone is bilingual?
4. How might someone become a ‘balanced bilingual’? How common is this likely to be?
5. Relate the findings of Spolek and Saunders to the New York Times opinion piece. Here is the link to the NYT piece: www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/opinion/bilingual-children.html
PART 2: Please briefly (600 words in total) answers these questions based upon Chapter 5 in the textbook
Connecting some of the issues in this chapter with those discussed in earlier chapters, discuss why the study of pidgin and creole languages was considered somewhat marginal to the field of linguistics and, similarly, why the languages themselves seem not to be frequently held in high esteem. How do the histories of their developments, and who the typical speakers are, influence the attitudes about them in both scholarly and lay circles?
Can the terms basilect, mesolect, and acrolect be applied to varieties other than creole languages? Some creolists feel that either all languages have a creole continuum, or no languages do; discuss in what ways this is a useful concept, and if it can be applied to non-creole languages or not.
How is creole formation different from, for example, the development of English, a Germanic language which was influenced by French as well as other German languages? Discuss this both in terms of the different social scenarios which led to the development of English versus creole languages and in terms of the structural outcomes.
If students have knowledge about language from other linguistics courses (especially formal linguistics where they have been introduced to the concept of Universal Grammar), discuss the arguments for the role of linguistic universals in creole formation. Note that this perspective is usually believed to be combined with other processes in creole formation which focus more on input.
