The emergence of creole languages is a process; language acquisition is a process; the original growth and development of human language was assuredly a process. To apply to processes those methods expressly designed to handle static-synchronic system is simply absurd; in order to do this, you have to pretend that a process is a state, and ignore exactly those characteristics that render it distinctive. Such a procedure is sometimes defended as an “idealization” […] but the difference between “idealization” and “convenient fiction” seems not to be grasped […].
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.104-105