When speakers of mutually unintelligible languages are forced into prolonged contact, they often develop a pidgin—a structurally impoverished communicative code lacking a stable grammar. If children are born into a community where a pidgin is the primary linguistic input, they do not acquire the pidgin; rather, they spontaneously generate a fully functional, syntactically complex language known as a creole. In the 1980s, linguist Derek Bickerton proposed the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH) to explain this phenomenon. Bickerton noted that geographically isolated creoles—ranging from Hawaiian Creole English to Haitian Creole—exhibit striking structural similarities despite having no historical contact. For instance, most creoles employ preverbal markers to indicate tense, mood, and aspect, rather than using the complex morphological inflections characteristic of European superstrate languages. According to Bickerton, because the impoverished pidgin input is structurally insufficient to explain this complex grammar, children must draw upon an innate linguistic bioprogram, hardwired into the human brain, to construct the language's syntax.
The LBH, while influential, has faced robust opposition from 'substratists,' who argue that the structural similarities among creoles are not the product of an innate biological template, but rather the result of shared linguistic inheritances from the substrate languages—the native languages of the original adult pidgin speakers. Substratists point out that the vast majority of Atlantic creoles share distinct structural affinities with a specific subset of West African languages. Furthermore, sociohistorical evidence suggests that the transition from pidgin to creole is rarely the abrupt, single-generation metamorphosis posited by Bickerton. Instead, demographic records indicate that many creoles underwent a gradual, multi-generational process of syntactic complexification, heavily influenced by continuous influxes of adult bilinguals.
Based on the passage, which of the following is NOT a premise or observation relied upon by Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH)?
- The structural similarities found across different creoles are largely attributable to the grammatical features of the native languages spoken by the original adult population.Answer
- BThe transition from a rudimentary contact code to a fully functional language occurs rapidly over the course of a single generation.
- CCreole languages that developed independently in disparate regions of the world exhibit notable syntactic parallels despite a lack of historical interaction.
- DCreole grammars typically favor the use of preverbal markers over morphological inflections to convey temporal and aspectual information.
- EThe primary linguistic input provided to the first generation of creole speakers is structurally insufficient to account for the resulting language's grammatical complexity.