Languages in Contact: The Partial Restructuring of Vernaculars

Accounting for the structural differences between "non-creole" language varieties (such as African-American English, Afrikaans and Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese) and the European source languages out of which they grew, John Holm argues that these differences resulted from "partial restructuring". Whereas some of the source languages' morphological and syntactic features were retained, a significant number of features from the non-native speakers' languages were also introduced. Holm identifies the linguistic processes leading to partial restructuring, bringing into focus an aspect of contact-induced language change which has previously not been analyzed.