Relabelling

The term relabelling is used (following Claire Lefebvre) to refer to the replacement of the phonological representations of substrate words by phonetic strings of semantically corresponding words from a lexifier language during the process of relexification.

• "Relexification is thus a mental process that builds new lexical entries by copying the lexical entries of an already established lexicon and replacing their phonological representations with representations derived from another language...I will refer to this second phase of relexification as relabelling." (Lefebvre 1998:16)

Origin

Coined by Claire Lefebvre and John Lumsden in the 1990s (Lefebvre 1998:16).

Reference

• Lefebvre, Claire. 1998. Creole genesis and the acquisition of grammar: The case of Haitian Creole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.