1997 年 4 巻 1 号 p. 1_21-1_34
Bickerton (1981, 1984a) proposed the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis to account for commonalties among genetically unrelated creole languages. In support of this theory he argues that some phenomena in first language acquisition cannot be explained without such a bioprogram. In particular, he proposed that the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in French, Italian, English, and Turkish can only be accounted for by assuming that children know in advance the distinctions between State and Process and between Punctual and Non-Punctual. This paper proposes an alternative account which does not rely on an innate bioprogram. Based on previous studies of the acquisition of verb morphology and the distributional pattern in native speech in various languages, this paper argues that the acquisitional pattern which Bickerton attributes to innate knowledge can be accounted for by distributional bias in the input. Essentially, this paper proposes that children form their initial prototypes of tense-aspect markers based in part on the correlational bias between verb types and tense-aspect markers in the input they are exposed to. This paper concludes with a caution against relying on innateness explanations for language acquisition phenomena without exploring other possible explanations.
