Derek Bickerton (born March 25, 1926) is a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a feature of the human species. He is the father of contemporary artist Ashley Bickerton.

A graduate of the University of Cambridge, England in 1949, Derek Bickerton entered academic life in the 1960s, first as a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and then, after a year's postgraduate work in linguistics at the University of Leeds, as Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Guyana (1967-71). For twenty-four years he was a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii, having meanwhile received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Cambridge (1976).

Known the world over for his work on the evolution of language, he is the author of many books, including Language and Species. Derek Bickerton's most recent book, Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain, was co-written with William H. Calvin and published by MIT Press.

In his book Roots of Language, Bickerton speculates on a theory to answer three questions:

1. How did creole languages originate?
2. How do children acquire language?
3. How did the language faculty originate as a feature of the human species?

In Language and Species, he suggests that all three questions might be answered by speculating that the origin of language might be traced to the evolution of representation systems and symbolic thinking, together with a later development of formal syntax. Using primitive communication faculties, which then evolved in parallel, mental models became shared representations subject to cultural evolution. In Lingua ex Machina he and William Calvin revise this speculative theory by considering the biological foundations of symbolic representation and their influence on the evolution of the brain.

Bibliography

• Tropicana, A Novel., 1963
• Dynamics Of A Creole System, 1975
• Bickerton, Derek (1981). Roots of Language. Karoma Publishers. ISBN 0-89720-044-6. 
• The language bioprogram hypothesis, in: The Behavioral Sciences 7, 173-188, 1984.
• Bickerton, Derek (1990). Language and Species. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-04610-9. 
• Language and Human Behavior, 1995
• Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain, 2000 (co-author with William H. Calvin)

External links

• A brief self-description related to Lingua Ex Machina.