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Issues in the Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages. CLAIRE LEFEBVRE. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004. xv + 358 pp. (Cloth euro99.00, US$119.00)
This collection of essays is intended to clarify the relexification hypothesis (RH) presented in Lefebvre's 1998 book Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar. It elaborates some of her explanations, and to some extent addresses issues raised over die years about her positions.1 Unfortunately, because little effort has been made to reduce redundancies and little new has been added, her efforts to elaborate on specific aspects of her relexification hypothesis and highlight the contribution that creolistics can make to general linguistics are less than fully successful.
The book revolves about the evolution of Creoles, especially Haitian Creole (HC), and the role of relexification and leveling in this process. According to Lefebvre, these are "processes otherwise known to play a role in language genesis and in language change in general" (p. 2). Relexification operates within individual second language learners, while leveling reduces variation among them, through what I suspect to be mutual accommodations. But why would individual speakers first relexify the target language only to level out their differences in order to converge toward a communal system? Wouldn't the relevant learners have found it more cost-effective to listen to each other and select structures that guaranteed successful communication even before they had fully relexified the target language at the cost of little mutual intelligibility?
Following the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 argues that Creoles and pidgins have developed only in multilingual communities, but it says nothing of Berbice Dutch, which evolved out of the contact of primarily Eastern Ijo and Dutch. Lefebvre claims, as traditionally in creolistics, that in settings where Creoles developed, "speakers of the substratum languages generally [had] little access to the superstratum language" (p. 8). She does not address the counter-position that there was no break in the transmission of the lexifier (Chaudenson 2001, Mufwene 2001). She also claims that Creoles...