This volume is a collection of 10 articles that Lefebvre has written since the publication of her 1998 volume, Creole genesis and the acquisition of grammar: The case of Haitian Creole. With the exception of the first chapter (a brief introduction) and the third chapter (a summary of her relexification hypothesis), the chapters of this volume consist of articles that were originally published elsewhere. For that reason, each chapter essentially stands on its own. Consequently, the volume suffers from some unavoidable overlap and, more significantly, a lack of coherence.
The volume consists of 10 chapters, references, two appendixes, an author index, and a subject index. Curiously, for a book entitled Issues in the study of pidgin and creole languages, there is no language index and the only languages listed in the subject index are Gbe and Haitian Creole (HC). This might be due to the fact that Lefebvre focuses her analysis on HC. Indeed, there are very little data in the volume from creoles other than HC. Although it is true that Lefebvre advocates “shifting the object of study from language varieties to the processes at work in the formation of these varieties” (p. 24), cross-creole data would seem to be necessary for the volume to live up to its title.
Chapter 2, “The Genesis of Pidgin and Creole Languages: A State of the Art,” summarizes and critiques the various competing theories that have been proposed to account for the genesis of pidgin and creole languages. Readers of this journal might be disappointed to discover that Lefebvre's analysis of the imperfect second language learning theory (i.e., pidgin and creole languages represent crystallized, imperfect versions of the acquisition of a second language) as expressed in Jespersen (1922) and later elaborated in Schumann (1978), Andersen (1980), and Valdman (1980), among others, is so brief. This brevity is somewhat puzzling because Lefebvre argues both that the combined processes of relexification, reanalysis, and dialect leveling account for a wider range of features than the other theories she examines and that “this account is a further development of the second language acquisition theory of PC genesis” (p. 29). It is therefore unclear why Lefebvre's relexification hypothesis is analyzed discretely rather than as a continuation of the SLA theory.
Chapter 3, “The Relexification Account of Creole Genesis: The Case of Haitian Creole,” is an 86-page summary of Lefebvre's (1998) 480-page volume, and it is one of two chapters that were written expressly for this volume (the other is the 6-page introductory chapter). This chapter is the most substantive of the 10 (although there is considerable overlap with chapters 2 and 9), and it explicates with precision Lefebvre's case for the interplay of relexification, reanalysis, and dialect leveling in creole genesis. Lefebvre argues convincingly that the relexification of several substratum lexicons creates variation in an incipient creole and that two other processes—dialect leveling and reanalysis—are therefore applied by the speakers to reduce this variation. The link between leveling and relexification is examined in detail in chapter 9, “The Interplay of Relexification and Levelling in Creole Genesis and Development.”
Chapter 4, “What Do Creole Studies Have to Offer to Mainstream Linguistics?” chapter 5, “On Data,” chapter 6, “Multifunctionality and the Concept of Lexical Entry,” and chapter 7, “On the Semantic Opacity of Creole Languages,” were first published as a series of columns in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages in 2000 and 2001 and are therefore widely available. The sequence of these chapters mirrors the order in which they first appeared in print, but such an order is not entirely logical for the purposes of this volume. One would expect, for example, that the issue of data collection would be addressed much earlier than chapter 5. This unfortunate sequencing results in thematic leaps from chapter to chapter that ultimately detract from the overall coherence of the volume.
The tenth and final chapter (there is no concluding chapter), “The Emergence of Productive Morphology in Creole Languages: The Case of Haitian Creole,” is a significant contribution to a woefully neglected area in the study of creole languages.
To summarize, Lefebvre's volume provides a useful overview of her extensive research on HC within the generative grammar framework, particularly her relexification hypothesis. Taken as a whole, however, the relationship between the chapters is tenuous; the only element that appears to link all of the various issues is the fact that they are addressed on the basis of data drawn from HC.
