It is not absolutely necessary, for communicative purposes, that a language have either an extensive vocabulary or a variety of syntactic structures; but the goals of language, whether social communication or mental computation, seem to be better served if a language has these things.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.14

Languages, even creoles, are systems, systems have structure, and things incompatible with that structure cannot be borrowed […].
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.50

[…] languages independently invent rules when these are demanded by the structure of the language plus functional requirements.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.55

All previous universals theories have been static theories, which assume that language is always and everywhere the same; if one accepts this, it follows that only features that occur in all languages can really qualify as candidates for innateness. But the present theory is a dynamic, evolutionary theory which assumes that language had a starting point and a sequence of developments, which are recycled, as well as perhaps in certain types of linguistic change […]. What is innate is therefore what was there at the beginning of the sequence, and thus there is not of the slightest reason to suppose that innate features will automatically persist and be found in the structure of all synchronic languages-indeed, given the nature of dynamic processes, this would be an extremely unlikely result.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.159

[…] we will get nowhere until we appreciate that anything as complex as language cannot possibly be an internally undifferentiated object, but rather must consist of a number of interacting systems, some of which may originally have developed for other purposes and many, perhaps all, of which must have developed at different times and under different circumstances.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.217-218

Language depends crucially not on complexification but on the power to abstract, as units, classes of objects, classes of actions, classes of events, and classes of yet more abstract kinds (think, for example, for a moment of all the different kinds of relationships that can be conveyed by so simple a predication as X has Y). It is these classes, not the particular objects, actions, etc., of which they are composed, that constitute the units that language must represent; but in order to represent it must first abstract them from the constant sensory bombardment to which all creatures are subject […].
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.219

Either language began as a consciously intended performance, in which case we have to show both how the intent could have been formed and how a conspecifics could have grasped both the fact that there was an intent and the reference that was intended, or it began accidentally.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.265

[…] language grew out of the cognitive system used for individual orientation, prediction, etc., rather than out of prior communicative systems. It would follow from this that the most likely means of expression, when this cognitive infrastructure finally emerged as a communicative system in its own right, would have been one which was quite separate from, and unlikely to be confused with, the prior system.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.267

Over a long period, language developed biologically in the following manner. In any group of any species, there is a certain amount of random variation which allows for variation in individual skill. Those individuals who had higher skills in the manipulation of language had those skills as a direct result of the fact that such random variation had produced, in other brains, mechanisms better adapted for converting preexisting mental representations into linguistic form by lexicalizing and grammaticizing the categories into which those representations were already sorted by neurological processes. Since language-skilled individuals possessed a higher potential for survivors, they would produce more offspring than other individuals, and the capacities that had arisen in them by random variation would be preserved and transmitted intact to their descendents.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.295

Meillet’s famous observation that “language is a system in which everything keeps its place” has the corollary that if a new element intrudes, everything must shift its place some what; while the latter statement may not be true of languages considered as wholes, it is certainly true for tight little grammatical subsystems like those of TMA.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.90