LANGUAGES IN CONTACT: THE PARTIAL RESTRUCTURING OF VERNACULARS, John Holm

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LANGUAGES IN CONTACT: THE PARTIAL RESTRUCTURING OF VERNACULARS. John Holm. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 175. $65.00 cloth.

Second language acquisition scholars have long looked to pidgin and creole studies for insights into the nature of interlanguage. For example, Andersen (1983) discussed the psychological processes of pidginization and creolization. Pidginization is SLA under conditions of severely restricted input and results in a variety (an incipient pidgin language or the beginning stages of an interlanguage) with a small set of lexical items, analytic and highly variable syntax, and minimal stylistic alternatives. Creolization is first language acquisition where a pidgin language serves as the input. In these circumstances, children create new form-meaning relationships that are not present in the pidgin, relying on the innate language-making capacity that Bickerton (1984) called the bioprogram. Thus, a creole language is a fully complex language that involves a radical restructuring of the lexifier language. Andersen (1983) coined the term nativization to include both processes, which, he noted, represent movement toward an internal norm. When pidgin and creole speakers come into greater contact with speakers of the superstrate, input is increased and the contact varieties are restructured in the direction of the standard language, a process Andersen called denativization.