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The personal pronoun paradigm of Solomon Islands Pijin exemplifies to some extent what the theory of relexification (as advanced by Lefèbvre et. al.) predicts: Phonetic strings derived from English lexemes are used to fill semantic categories found in the Melanesian substrate. This identification of vertical and horizontal axes, however, is not deemed sufficient to explain fully the resulting paradigm.
Grammatical/ case markings found in both sub- and superstate are largely not reconstituted; their function is filled by prepositions or syntactic position. The semantic distinctions unique to the superstrate (eg. gender) are lost; semantic distinctions of the substrate (eg. dual, trial number aside from sg. and pl.; inclusive/exclusive 1st ppls) are reconstituted, even if these are not considered high up on the list of UG-markedness.
English pronouns provide the main lexical source (iu, mi, hem), but they are reanalyzed and recombined morphologically with each other and other categories. To form the plural, for instance, -fala (derived from the noun 'fellow'), is suffixed to the singular pronoun forms.
This indicates not only that semantic content determines the structure of the paradigm, but suggests that there is a move to be observed from content to function word. This is deemed intuitively natural, as reality, culturally structured meaning, comes prior to language, a tool that serves logical and sociological functioning. As the essence of language is the capability of abstracting in order to encompass the reality of the speakers, Solomon Islanders go from people to pronouns; first, they need certain distinctions they make in their heads to be represented by distinctions in the language they speak or create. The ensuing grammatical functions are secondary, and develop later (perhaps as the language becomes more lateralized?).
It is thus postulated that the speaker takes the grammar of the substrate -the structures cognitively governing his speech faculty- then relexifies the semantically salient terms with phonological forms of the superstrate and incorporates them into a new system; he gets the rules and the players but creates a new game.
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