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Relative clauses in Tayo, the French-lexicon Creole of St-Louis (New Caledonia) which emerged in the late 19th century, reflect in their construction and their distribution typically Melanesian patterns, including a subordinator derived from a personal pronoun, sa. Thematization similarly reflects Melanesian strategies, but may also be handled by clefting using a subordinator ki (< French qui). While this construction shows how the lexifier may be modifying Tayo, the emergence of a complex system of relativization and thematization, over three generations after the settlement of St-Louis in 1860, shows that French was not the "motor" of creolization, and suggests that creolization is, in effect, a special case of language shift and creation over some 50 or so years.

In the process of pidginization and creolization that occurred in the 18th century, Mauritian Creole (Mau) did not retain the atonic clitics of French. In consequence, morphologically marked reflexives were lost, or paraphrased in various ways using especially the lexical item lekor 'body'. Where French uses a tonic pronoun (in the imperative), early Mau retained the structure. Continuing French semantactic influence reintroduced pronouns (derived from French tonic pronouns), at least in the usage of writers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in modern times, due to an evolving society, in the usual speech of increasing numbers of speakers. The result, i.e., the use of unmarked object pronouns to handle reflexivity, is typolog-ically a rather unusual pattern.

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