1 Lexical Borrowing, Creolization and Basic Vocabulary George L. Huttar 1. Introduction * This paper is concerned with two sets of questions, one from semantics and cognitive linguistics, one from diachronic linguistics and in particular creole studies. From the cognitive-semantic side, we are dealing with issues of “basic” vocabulary: what sorts of lexical items, or, more precisely, what sorts of concepts, are, in some useful sense or other (say, psychologically more salient), more “basic” than others? From the diachronic linguistics side, the issues concern likelihood of change through contact: “For what sorts of concepts are lexical items most readily replaced by items from new sources, and which ones are more resistant to such replacement?”, or, “For what sorts of concepts do lexical items reflect earlier contact, and which ones later contact?” Drawing primarily on data from a creole language, the paper attempts to suggest answers to both kinds of questions by relating the two to each other, exploring how the “basicness” of a lexical item may be related to its amenability to replacement under language contact. It is nothing new, of course, to claim that the “basicness” of lexical items may be correlated with how easily they are replaced in a language contact situation. As Thomason and Kaufman (1988:74) put it, “we know of no exceptions — and would be astonished to find any — to the rule that nonbasic vocabulary is always borrowed first.” They offer no definition of “basic vocabulary”, it apparently being taken for granted that we all know and agree what the term means — presumably the sorts of concepts reflected in “Swadesh” or similar lists commonly used in comparative reconstruction (see, e.g., Bynon 1977:267-268). The most studied creole languages arose as a result of contact between the language of a socially dominant group (such as plantation owners and overseers), the “superstrate”, and the languages of a number of socially oppressed groups (such as slaves), the “substrate”. Such creoles usually have * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1994 meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of these workpapers for their comments, which have greatly improved the present version. UTA Working Papers in Linguistics 1 (1994), Susan C. Herring & John C. Paolillo, eds.