Many inquiries have centered on substrate impact on Melanesia's creole languages: Tok Pisin, Solomons Pijin and Bislama. The same cannot be said concerning the impact in the opposite direction: contact-caused change happening in local vernaculars due to pressure from the creole. This article proposes a case study of divers instances of structural borrowing and semantic category change in Paluai, an Oceanic language spoken in Papua New Guinea. It is displayed that a number of functional elements originating from Tok Pisin are now solidly embedded in Paluai grammar: two verbs, gat and inap, and a conjunction, taim. Moreover, semantic categories are experiencing change and potentially attrition due to many-to-one correspondences. This proposes that it is important to consider language contact situations as dynamic and covering two-way change processes.