Soru

For decades, the study of Creole languages was dominated by the debate between substratists and universalists. Substratists, pointing to the structural similarities between Caribbean Creoles and West African languages, argued that enslaved adults actively retained their native syntactic structures while adopting European vocabularies. This view, however, struggled to account for the remarkable structural uniformity across Creoles globally, even those with vastly different substrate inputs.

Enter Derek Bickerton’s Language Bioprogram Hypothesis. Bickerton boldly claimed that Creole grammar is not inherited from substrate languages at all, but rather emerges innately from children. According to Bickerton, when children are exposed only to a pidgin—a rudimentary, structureless contact language—their innate language faculty (the bioprogram) automatically supplies the missing grammar, resulting in a fully formed Creole. Because this bioprogram is universal to all humans, Creoles worldwide exhibit striking similarities.

While Bickerton’s theory elegantly explains the global uniformity of Creoles, it relies on a questionable premise: that the pidgins preceding Creoles were entirely devoid of structure. Recent sociolinguistic data suggest otherwise. The first generations of Creole speakers were not isolated children, but communities of adults who likely communicated in expanded pidgins that already possessed significant substrate-derived syntactic complexity. Thus, while innate cognitive constraints undoubtedly shape all language acquisition, the specific grammatical features of Creoles are more accurately understood as the result of adult language mixing than as the unfiltered expression of a biological blueprint.

According to the passage, which of the following statements about Creole languages is explicitly attributed to the substratists?