Socioprogrammed linguistics
William John Samarin · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 1984
On this occasion I am concerned less with whether or not Bickerton can argue successfully for innate "cognitive device" and a "processing component" as fundamental human endowments than with whether evidence for the hypothesis is found in the so-called creoles. Alternatively, one can assess Bickerton's argument entirely with respect to its ability to explain the ostensible similarities in these languages, since he claims that his "is one, and so far the only, explanation." On the one hand is a single Hawaiian "creole" and on the other a whole group of languages whose speakers have an African ancestry. The sets are presented as having self-evident integrity, but they remain highly problematic. (Bickerton has preempted the word creole, for what he calls "true creoles," misleading talking of "all creoles" when he means only the languages he uses.) The question lies not with the linguistic data, the contemporary forms of which are of easy access, but with their sociohistorical interpretation.