Problems
However, monogenesis and relexification have a number of problems. First, as Todd admits, pidgins, by "shedding linguistic redundancies" such as syntactic complexity, have removed the features that allow linguists to identify relatedness. Relexification assumes that, in learning a second language, people can learn vocabulary and grammar separately and that they will learn the latter but replace the former. In addition, pidgin languages are inherently unstructured, so relexification does not account for how the syntactic structure of a creole could emerge from the languages that lack such structure.
Bickerton (1977) also points out that relexification postulates too many improbabilities and that it is unlikely that a language "could be disseminated round the entire tropical zone, to peoples of widely differing language background, and still preserve a virtually complete identity in its grammatical structure wherever it took root, despite considerable changes in its phonology and virtually complete changes in its lexicon."
Read more about this topic: Monogenetic Theory Of Pidgins
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