BV is fairly close to what Bickerton (1990) describes as“protolanguage,”under which he lumps the organization of
pidgins, the grammatical competence attained by Genie, and the achievements of the language-trained apes. His
characterization in particular agrees with features (a)–(e) of BV. However, Bickerton attributes to protolanguage a less
stable word order than that of BV; this may be partly because his evidence comes from pidgins, which are heavily
influenced by the native languages of their speakers.
I suggest, then, that Agent First, Focus Last, and Grouping are“fossil principles”fro mprotolanguage, which modern
languages oftenobserveand frequentlyelaborate. Like thefeatures Bickertondiscusses, theyoftensurviveindegraded
forms of language, which may serve as evidence for their evolutionarily more primitive character. Crucially, these
principles correlate linear order with semantic roles. They do not require syntactic structure: the linear order of words
can be determined directly in terms of phonological concatenation.
Another possible protolinguistic“fossil” in English is the formation of compound nouns such assnowman and
blackboard. About the only solid principle of meaning in English compounds is that the second word is the“head,”the
word that denotesthe larger category intowhichthe compound noun falls. For instance a snowman is basically a kind
of man, not a kind of snow. (And even this is violated in cases likepickpocket, which is not a kind of pocket, and
bonehead, which is not a kind of head but a kind of person.) Within the constraints of this“Head Principle,”a wide
variety of semantic relations is possible between the nouns, in large part mediated by their meanings. (1) offers a
sample (the presence or absence of a space between the nouns is purely an accident of spelling).
(1) a. Locative relations:
doghouse= house for a dog to live in
housedog= dog that lives in a house.
b. Part–whole relations:
wheelchair= a chair with wheels as parts
chairleg= leg that serves as part of a chair
snowman= man made of snow
cakeflour=flour that cakes are made of
c. Resemblance relations:
zebrafish=fishthat resembles a zebra
d. Actions performed by or on objects:
garbage man= man who carries away garbage
fruit man= man who sells fruit
sun hat= hat that protects against the sun
butter knife= knife used for spreading butter