This paper addresses the question of the existence and manifestation of Root Infinitives (RI) in the acquisition of a creole language, Jamaican Creole (JC). It examines JC children’s omission of progressive and prospective aspectual markers in the clausal map in order to determine if early JC includes a root infinitive stage. It shows that non-target-consistent bare verb structures in child JC have distributional properties which have been claimed to be hallmarks of RI: in particular, they occur in declaratives (and in yes-no questions), but not in wh-questions, and they typically co-occur with null subjects, whereas subjects are typically overt in clauses with fully specified aspectual markers. It shows that these properties are expected under a truncation approach (Rizzi, 1993/4; De Lisser et al., 2016), and briefly compares truncation and other approaches to RI. Additionally, the paper compares the properties of truncation and the “growing trees” approach introduced in Friedmann, Belletti and Rizzi (this volume), according to which learners’ productions start with minimal structures in a bottom up fashion, and then higher zones get added on top of the structure as development proceeds, following the hierarchical organization uncovered by cartographic work. Finally, the paper discusses the similarities and differences between the two ideas, and argues that they are compatible, and possibly reflect different stages in language development.