Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 14, Issue 2, 1999

This article describes the research program of Lefebvre, Lumsden, and their associates concerning the hypothesis that relexification plays a central role in creole genesis. The methodology of the program is presented along with a brief illustration of the data that has been used to test the hypothesis. A final section discusses the gratuitous attack on this program published in Singler (1996). On inspection, it turns out that some of Singler's objections are so vague as to be incoherent. Others are shown to derive from his unfortunate propensity to attribute "claims" to Lefebvre and Lumsden's research that are not made by the authors themselves and from his insistence that this research in particular should meet methodological standards that are obviously unreasonable. In fact, there is solid support for the hypothesis that relexification plays a central role in the genesis of creole languages.

Because Jamaican Creole lacks the familiar morphological indicators of the passive that characterize English, its lexifier language, it has sometimes been assumed that Jamaican either lacks a passive, or that its passive is fundamentally different from that of English. However, a Government and Binding analysis explicitly shows that Jamaican Creole has a passive and that it is formed, syntactically, in the same way as morphologically signaled passives, including that of English. The conclusion is that there is, indeed, a passive morpheme in Jamaican Creole which, though devoid of phonetic content, behaves the same as the overt passive morphemes of other languages.

This research applies Verse Analysis to the study of creole languages seeking evidence to support the two principal theories: universalist and sub-stratist theories. Evidence is presented from Hawaii Creole English (HCE), Guyanese Creole, and Japanese. HCE manifests in discourse a possibly universal feature of patterning (i.e., hierarchical grammatico-semantic recurrence), which is shared by Guyanese Creole as well as Chinook Jargon and quite a few Native American languages. On the other hand, HCE also shows an idiosyncratic phenomenon of numbering (i.e., doublets, triplets, quadruplets, etc., in lines and verses), which appears to have been linguistically transferred from Japanese as a substratum. Linguistic data, sociohistorical facts, and a scenario of substratum transfer are presented. This research reinforces a hypothesis that both internal innate properties and external substratal factors need to be taken into account to explain the origin of creole discourse grammar.