Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 7, Issue 1, 1992

Bickerton's bioprogram hypothesis uses serial verbs as a primary demonstration that Saramaccan represents the closest approximation to Universal Grammar extant, judging from the fact that speakers of mutually unintelligible West African languages formulated it with little contact with European languages. Closer examination of Saramaccan and its substrate languages suggests, however, that the creole is a prime demonstration of substrate influence. The uniformity of serials across the substrate languages can be shown to have provided the opportunity for compromise between the small differences in the constructions in forming the language, according to perceptual saliency relative to the languages involved. A survey of serializing language families shows that serials in Saramaccan are most similar to those in its substrate, while a survey of créoles around the world shows that serials appear in créoles with similar substrates and almost never in those with nonserializing substrates. Furthermore, the explanation of serials as compensation for missing categories in Saramaccan is belied by an evaluation of this argument as applied to prepositions, which shows that the Saramaccan system mirrors that of its substrate with limited accommodations to its superstrate.

In this study it is argued that what Naro (1978) calls the Reconnaissance Language (RL) was not a pidgin language but simply an instance of foreigner talk (FT). Historical evidence is presented from which it can be reasonably inferred that Portuguese FT must have existed before the RL was purportedly formed. Moreover, it is claimed that if the Portuguese in fact taught African captives simplified Portuguese, which is not entirely supported by the facts, the strategies and patterns from which they would have drawn, to simplify their language and teach it to the Africans, arguably stem from FT strategies that already existed in Portuguese. By simply assuming that Portuguese FT strategies existed at the time of the Portuguese seaborne expansion, all the features of Naro's RL are accounted for. Consequently, positing something like an RL, i.e., a code consciously developed by the Portuguese court to teach to African captives who were prospective interpreters, becomes unnecessary.