In Pieter Muysken's stimulating, informative, and comprehensive overview of Creole theories there are unfortunately one or two misinterpretations of my position. While I have claimed that Creoles are more alike than other languages, and have suggested that they may be in some sense more natural than other languages, I don't think I have ever explicitly stated that they are more simple: the whole concept of simplicity in language is strewn with epistemological and other landmines, and should perhaps be avoided altogether.

Again, on a minor point of detail, it is not the case that ‘around them, [first-generation creole children] only heard pidgin spoken.’ Obviously, they also heard an indefinite number of ancestral languages; these, however, they ignored, precisely because the elaboration of the pidgin represented, to them, far less of a task than the learning of an ancestral language and the subsequent transfer of features from that language to the nascent creole. The nature of the bioprogram rendered input from other languages quite unnecessary for them.

In light of the approach sketched in the present chapter, two of Muysken's ‘core notions’, parameter theory and morphology–syntax interactions, simply fall together: parametric variation is relegated to the lexicon and the interaction between a variable morphology and invariant principles of syntax is what in fact produces the so-called ‘parametric differences’ among languages.