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polygenesis (multiple origin), and it found support in DeCamp’s (1971a, p. 24) argument
that there are ‘certain pidgins and creoles which clearly developed without any direct
Portuguese influence’. In fact, few creolists would argue for a pure monogenesis theory,
but most accept that a certain amount of relexification is an important element in the
development of pidgins and creoles, particularly when closely related lexicons, such as
Creole Spanish and Creole Portuguese are involved (Holm, 1988, pp. 51–2).
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PIDGINS AND
CREOLES
A particularly interesting and provocative explanation for the development and
characteristics of creoles has been offered by Bickerton (1974, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1984a).
Bickerton argues (1984, p. 173; emphasis added) ‘in favor of a language bioprogram
hypothesis (henceforth LBH) that suggests that the infrastructure of language is
specified at least as narrowly as Chomsky has claimed’. The arguments for LBH are
drawn from Bickerton’s observations about the way in which a creole language develops
from a pidgin which is in an early stage of development (ibid.):
The LBH claims that the innovative aspects of creole grammar are
inventions on the part of the first generation of children who have a pidgin
as their linguistic input, rather than features transmitted from preexisting
languages. The LBH claims, further, that such innovations show a degree
of similarity, across wide variety in linguistic background, that is too great
to be attributed to chance. Finally, the LBH claims that the most cogent
explanation of this similarity is that it derives from the structure of a
species-specific program for language, genetically coded and expressed,
in ways still largely mysterious, in the structures and modes of operation
of the human brain.
The data Bickerton uses to support his hypothesis shows early-stage pidgin to lack any
consistent means of marking tense, aspect, and modality, to have no consistent system of
anaphora, no complex sentences, no systematic way of distinguishing case relations, and
variable word order (1984a, p. 175). Children faced with this type of input impose ways
of realizing the missing features, but they do not borrow these realizations from the
language which is dominant in their environment, nor from the substrate language(s), and
Bickerton concludes that ‘the LBH or some variant thereof seems inescapable…[and] the
LBH carries profound implications for the study of language in general, and for the study
of language acquisition and language origins in particular’ (1984a, p. 184).
Bickerton claims (p. 178) that the evidence he cites shows the similarities in creoles to
arise from ‘a single substantive grammar consisting of a very restricted set of categories
and processes, which…constitute part, or all, of the human species-specific capacity for
syntax’. He leans towards the view that the single, substantive grammar does, in fact,
constitute all of universal grammar, and he thinks that this view is supported by Slobin’s
(1977, 1982, 1984b) notion of a basic child grammar, a grammar which is generated by