Linguistics & Language · Historical & Comparative Linguistics
A topic within Historical & Comparative Linguistics, itself one of 10 topics in that field and part of Linguistics & Language.
2 works
Derek Bickerton
Argues that children born into a pidgin-speaking community independently supply the grammatical machinery the pidgin lacks, and that the specific structures they converge on across unrelated creoles reveal an innate bioprogram for grammar.
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Argues that a creole's grammar is not the output of an innate bioprogram activated by impoverished input, but the predictable result of which features of the contributing languages succeeded under local social conditions, modelled as competition and selection among coexisting language varieties.