DEFINING THE TARGET LANGUAGE IN LANGUAGE GENESIS 61

accelerating the process: "...as children are born into the community
where they hear not only the dialects of their parents but also the
mixture being used around them. Here the children acquire only some
features and not others, and thus leveling and stabilization is
accelerated"(128).
 Siegel looks at pidginization in terms of SLA and leveling processes.
He claims that the processes involved in the early stages of SLA are
responsible for a good portion of the features found in pidgins. The
characteristics of the two groups join a pool of variants used by different
individuals for intergroup communication. When communication is
successful, further SLA is not necessary. In that sense, Siegel is saying
that there is fossilization at a certain stage of acquisition. He points
out that conventions in the use of these variants begin to emerge, giving
way to a process of leveling. Some variants are eliminated and others
are retained presumably based on universal principles of markedness.
The end result may be a stabilized pidgin.
 Siegel argues that the processes involved in the early stages of SLA
are responsible for some of the features found in pidgins (and some
creoles). Much can be learned about pidgin genesis in terms of the
origins of various pidgin features by considering the processes and
strategies (e.g. reduction, transfer and restructuring) clearly
documented in SLA studies. Once that is accepted, we can move on to
an explanation about how the efforts of two groups to acquire a little
of the language of the other can fuse into a single pidgin. First lexical
items are learned from a given language, usually privileged due to some
uneven power relation. When they are put together, it is done with
typical interlanguage features, such as absence of bound morphology,
lack of copula, etc. as well as transferred features from the first
languages. These ways of speaking both languages join a pool of variants
used by different individuals for intergroup communication.
Communication using these variants is successful in the limited
contexts where it is required, and therefore, further SLA is not
necessary. In some social circumstances, however, conventions begin
to emerge. This is the beginning of leveling: the elimination of some
variants and the retention of others. The end result may be a stabilized
pidgin. SLA accounts for the origins of a large proportion of the features
of a pidgin, but leveling accounts for the formation of the pidgin out of
the highly variable pre-pidgin. SLA is an individual process, whereas
leveling (or stabilization) is a community process.
 Thomason and Kaufman (T&K 1988:150) see the development of
pidgins as similar to the results of other language contact situations.