Gram - SEAS

220 8 Situations of extreme language contact
rudimentary, not a full language. Their children therefore grew up in the absence
of viable native language models. They rapidly developed creoles, many of which
show similar structural properties throughout the world. Since these children had
no access to native languages and developed with exceptional rapidity, he argued,
creoles provide privileged evidence for a "bioprogram" or innate human-specific
neurological disposition that permits children who have no extensive consistent
language input to create a new language out of the bits and pieces of degenerate
input they encounter.
In an early characterization of the bioprogram, Bickerton (\ 981: 212) hypothe­
sized that it had the following essentially semantic characteristics:
(i) specific/non-specific
(ii) state/process
(iii) punctuallnonpunctual
(iv) causative/non-causative
In a later version he hypothesized that the bioprogram had the syntactic charac­
teristics of a limited simple clause, one which assigns only subject and object, but
no other case markers, and therefore no prepositions (Bickerton 1984: 179). Other
characteristics include zero copula. The bioprogram was, however, hypothesized
to include serial verbs of the type illustrated in (10):
(10) a. Dei gon get naif pok you.
they go get knife poke you
'They will stab you with a knife.'
(1896 Hawaiian English Creole; Bickerton 1984: 175)
b. Dee o-tei faka tjoko unu
they MODAL-take knife stab you:PL
'They will stab you with a knife.'
(Saramaccan Creole; Bickerton 1984: 179)
Later Bickerton put forward the stronger hypothesis that "there is a single set of
universal syntactic principles. These principles are absolute and do not undergo
any form of vriation, parametric or other" (Bickerton 1988: 272). All variation is,
according to this theory, a function of acquisition of lexical items and of processes
acting on them. In other words, the bioprogram is hypothesized to be neurologi­
cally far more restricted than UG; nevertheless, it has much in common with that
hypothesis.
A particularly striking example of the operation of the bioprogram, it was
claimed, is exemplified in Surinam in the eighteenth century, where after a revolu­
tion the slaves dispersed into the bush and developed Saramaccan Creole indepen­
dent of any access to native languages or to a local creole (B yrne 1987). However,
Singler (1992) and McWhorter (2000a) challenged the claim that Saramaccan