One of the deepest and most ancient problems in philosophy is what we might call the problem of knowledge. There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between our abstract, complex, highly structured knowledge of the world, and the concrete, limited and confused information provided by our senses. Since the Meno, there have been two basic ways of approaching this problem, rationalism and empiricism. Each era seems to have its matched pair of advocates of each view, making their way through the centuries like couples in some eternal philosophical gavotte, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Locke, Leibniz and Berkeley, Kant and Mill. The rationalist approach says that although it looks as if we learn about the world from our experience, we don’t really. Actually, we knew about it all along. The most important things we know were there to begin with, planted innately in our minds by God or evolution (or chance). The empiricist approach says that although it looks as if our knowledge is far removed from our experience, it isn’t really. If we rearrange the elements of our experience in particular ways, by associating ideas, or putting together stimuli and responses, we’ll end up with our knowledge of the world. There is both a tension and a kind of complementarity between these two ideas,

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this paper was presented to the Symposium on Iconicity in Grammar, Stanford University, June 24-26, 1983. The present version will be published in the proceedings of the symposium, edited by John Haiman for the "Typological Studies of Language" Series of John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. Research contributing to this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant BNS 80-09340: "Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition") and by the Sloan Foundation Program in Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley. I have benefited especially from discussions of these ideas with Joan Bybee, and from a careful reading of the first draft by Dwight Bolinger

Abstract: The original notion of acts of identity (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985), based upon studies of variation in Atlantic Creoles, is reconsidered, and its contingency upon particular features of the samples is explored. The mission of exploring the formation of identity in ‘new ’ societies is viewed from a perspective on the historical development of Creole speech communities. Variation in two (post-) Creole data-sets is analysed, for some of the same variables studied in Acts: one group (London Jamaican youth) is typical of that studied under the Acts paradigm in its diffuseness, while another (urban mesolectal Jamaicans in Kingston) is not. A typology of linguistic identity work is suggested – identity development, identity shift, and identity modification – differentiated by age and developmental processes, and by degree of reorientation. * This paper was presented to the Colloquy on Acts of Identity, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, February

The tactics may have changed. However the end results remain the same. Linguistic Genocide is no newcomer to the Caribbean. In the early stages of European colonization of the Caribbean, many indigenous languages disappeared due to widespread physical elimination of the populations speaking these languages. Today the danger is either one of hostile language policies or just plain indifference. New generations are no longer transmitting the language(s) of the communities into which they were born and more than ever community languages are disappearing on a large scale. A language will not survive if the older generation does not use it with the younger generation. With the disappearance of domains within which indigenous languages would naturally be used, opportunities for cross-generational transmission disappear. This paper will discuss the process by which Caribbean indigenous languages disappear and the forces favouring language preservation.

Prompted self-explanation, tutored practice, worked examples, analogical comparisons, second