Haitian Creole Syntax: A Case for Det as Head

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 1997

This paper seeks to provide a unified analysis of the particle se in Haitian Creole, traditionally identified as an equality marker, a resumptive pronoun, or a focus marker. This study also serves to illustrate the role and the structural organization of functional projections in this non-inflected language. Under the proposed analysis, se (as well as ye, which has long been recognized as bearing a relation to se) is not a verbal copula; rather, it is a predicate forming aspectual head. A unified analysis based on general principles of UG is offered for se, appearing in predicative sentences, in nominal clefts, and in predicate cleft constructions. It is argued that in all these contexts, se always occurs with DP predicates or predicates headed by a functional head, such as CP predicates, not with any other type of predicates. 1 This research was originally presented at the GLOW Workshop on Creole Languages (April 1992, Lisbon). We are much indebted to Jean-Robert Cadely and Marie-Denise Sterlin for useful discussions on HC data, and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The usual disclaimers apply. This research was partly supported by SSHRCC (Vinet 410-93-0838).

2015

This paper describes the emergence of new functional items in the Mauritian Creole (MC) noun phrase, following the loss of the French determiner system when superstrate and substrate languages came in to contact. The aim of the paper is to show how the new language strived to express the universal semantic contrasts of (in)definiteness and singular vs. plural. The process of grammaticalization of new functional items in the determiner system was accompanied by changes in the syntax from French to creole. An analysis within Chomsky’s Minimalist framework (1995, 2000, 2001) suggests that these changes were driven by the need to map semantic features onto the syntax.

The University of Queensland Working Papers in …, 2007

This paper describes the emergence of new functional items in the Mauritian Creole (MC) noun phrase, following the loss of the French determiner system when superstrate and substrate languages came in to contact. The aim of the paper is to show how the new language strived to ...

2019

In his article Three clause-final particles and the syntax of clausal complementation in Dravidian, K. A. Jayaseelan discusses the role of the question particle-oo, the complementizer ennǝ, and the relativizer-a, which occur in a fixed order in Malayalam, in case they co-occur. He argues that this order can be generated only if we postulate that the complementizer, which is a quotative element derived from the verb 'say', still retains its verbal syntax and projects its own clause. The relativizer-a can then be in the C domain of the clause projected by ennǝ, and the question particle-oo can be in the C domain of the CP complement of ennǝ. A surprising consequence of this analysis is that every embedded finite clause in Dravidian-the 'ennǝ + clause' structure-is in fact bi-clausal. Rahul Balusu's article Fine tuning the Dravidian left periphery: The three 'complementizers' in Telugu picks up on this, now with a focus on the related Dravidian language Telugu. He investigates in detail three left-peripheral morphemes that have been considered at various places in the previous literature as instances of complementizers. According to Balusu, none of these morphemes are typical complementizers. The linearly first left-peripheral morpheme-aa has all the signature properties of a polar question particle and is in many respects similar to its Hindi counterpart kyaa. The second left-peripheral morpheme,-oo, delimits the scope of questions in Telugu. This he attributes to its location in the Spec of CP, where it is basegenerated, and to its semantics, which is essential for interrogative semantics, thus explaining scope delimitations. The third left-peripheral morpheme, the quotative complementizer ani, is analysed as being syntactically and semantically true to its source, a verbum dicendi, the verb say, and its complementizer nature as arising only due to its not putting forth its extended projection (in the spirit of Grimshaw 2005) and instead being merged into the matrix clausal spine at various levels. The third contribution in this section turns to yet another Dravidian language, namely Tamil. In their article Discourse-driven scrambling to the peripheries in child Tamil, R. Amritavalli and Annu Kurian Mathew argue that the SOV-language Tamil has a pre-verbal focus and postverbal topic position. A subject wh-word must occur in focus, and not in a topic or in a canonical S(ubject) position. This leads to the distribution: *SwhOV, POSwhV, *OVSwh. Utterances from Josef Bayer & Yvonne Viesel 3 children 26-29 months of age are shown to obey these word order restrictions. The authors argue that child scrambling in Tamil moves arguments to criterial positions to check topic/focus features. A possible generalization with Japanese is suggested. A non-focus account of wh-is briefly critiqued. The second section, on Indo-Aryan, continues with the article Clause particles and cleft sentences in Bangla: Some preliminary generalizations by Probal Dasgupta. Intimacy-oriented discourse particles (DiPs), called Modul[ator]s in the Bangla syntax literature normally follow a finite verb or a compact wh-phrase. In his article, Dasgupta surveys interactions between a Modul and Zero Copula Construction (ZCC) in three subtypes of ZCC. He extends the discussion to other contexts now diagnosable as ZCCs-sentences in which a post-verbal constituent hosts either a Modul or some other DiP. He argues that certain sentences with these properties instantiate cleft constructions whose properties are explored here in the context of the study of DiP elements. Some preliminary generalizations are proposed. Section 3 contains two contributions on Japanese. The phenomenon of DiPs, which was introduced in Dasgupta's article, plays a role in the first article here, as well as in Sergio Monforte's article in Section 6, which concludes this volume. Yoshio Endo's article Exploring right/left peripheries: Expressive meanings in questions discusses non-standard questions in Japanese such as rhetorical, surprise, disapproval, exclamative, etc. (Obenauer 2006, Bayer and Obenauer 2011, Bayer 2018) within the framework of the cartography of syntactic structures. After introducing the basic ideas of the cartographic approach, Endo first examines the expressive meanings of some wh-expressions asking for reasons such as what…for, how come, etc. familiar from languages such as English, German, etc. He then turns to the main topic of examining various sentence final particles in the right periphery of the Japanese sentence to show how they contribute to creating expressive meanings in questions. Methodologically, he does this by looking at translations of Peanuts comics. Endo draws comparisons with German, where corresponding particles are placed in clause-medial position, and he speculates about the absence of similar particles in English. The article by Norio Nasu, Adverb-predicate agreement in Japanese and structural reduction, turns to the related topic of sentence adverbs (S-adverbs). In cartographic work, S-adverbs have a high position in the adverb hierarchy. Nasu shows that in Japanese, S-adverbs occur with a particular inflectional form of a predicate. He argues that this phenomenon is a manifestation of the agree relation between the adverb and a functional head. An agree-based analysis correctly predicts that an S-adverb can occur in more than one position as long as it is able to c-command the functional head it agrees with. It also accounts for restrictions on the cooccurrence of more than one S-adverb in a single clause. In Japanese, an epistemic adverb cannot precede an evidential adverb. The illegitimacy of this order is reduced to an intervention effect arising from agree. Nasu's analysis predicts that some S-adverbs in Japanese can occur at the edge of more than one functional projection as long as they enter an agree relation with the appropriate functional head. In this respect, the distribution of Japanese S-adverbs presents a departure from a principal assumption of the cartographic approach, i.e. a constituent appearing on the clausal left periphery is in a one-to-one spec-head relation with the appropriate functional head. The two contributions that appear in Section 4 discuss mainly the head-final language Turkish but also draw comparisons with the partially head-final language German. The article by Tamer Akan and Katharina Hartmann, SOV-X: Syntactic and pragmatic constraints of the postverbal domain in Turkish, sets out to develop a novel syntactic account for the postverbal domain in Turkish, which establishes a tight connection between syntactic and information-structural (IS) properties of the language. The authors first analyze the properties of the Turkish postnominal domain in comparison to the SOV-language German. Turkish is much less restricted than * I wish to thank Katalin Kiss for helpful comments on this paper. I also wish to thank the audience at the conference for an insightful discussion. 'He said (he) would come.' he (Nom.) come-1stP.Sg. say-3rdP.Sg. K. A. Jayaseelan 9 In (5), the complement of ennǝ is just a representation of a sound; there is no C domain here to generate ennǝ in. Even the noun complement construction can have a simple nominal as the complement of ennǝ, cf. (6) "kaakka" enn-a waakkǝ '(the) word "crow"' crow QUOT-REL word What such data show is that ennǝ is still a 'say'-verb, which can take as its complement anything that can be 'said', i.e. uttered; e.g. a sound ('Say "Boo!"'), or a word ('Say "crow"'), or a clause ('Say "Mary is pregnant"'). Though bleached in meaning-in (5), e.g., the machine doesn't 'say' anythingennǝ retains its verbal syntax. 2, 3 5 Clausal complementation in Dravidian What we have said has serious implications for the syntax of clausal complementation in Dravidian. When 'say' takes an object complement-irrespective of whether it is a sound, word, or clause-it goes without saying that it is outside that complement. Now consider a sentence where ennǝ takes a finite clause as its complement: (7) John [ Mary wannu ennǝ ] paRaññu 'John said that Mary has come.' John Mary came QUOT said We can now see that the correct analysis of (7) is that ennǝ is outside its CP complement; it is not in the C domain of the embedded clause at all. The 'say'-verb projects its own clause, which is nonfinite but can have its own C domain. The structure we postulate for (7) is (8) (abstracting away from word order): 4 2 Do we wish to entertain a "squishy" account of ennǝ, saying that it has been reanalyzed as a complementizer when it takes a clausal complement, but that it is still a 'say'-verb when it takes a nominal expression as its complement? Such a "two ennǝ's" analysis would be unsatisfactory for several reasons. First of all, note that ennǝ occurs indifferently with assertive and interrogative matrix verbs, showing an insensitiveness to the matrix predicate which is unexpected in a complement but is quite in keeping with an adjunct: (i) John [ Mary wannu ennǝ ] paRaññu 'John said that Mary has come.' John Mary came QUOT said (ii) John [ Mary wannu-oo ennǝ ] coodiccu 'John asked whether Mary has come.' John Mary came-Q QUOT asked Again, where do we generate ennǝ in the C domain? Suppose we generate it as the head of Finiteness Phrase. Then, in a sentence like (ii) above (or like (4)), the question particle-oo-and by implication ForceP-will have to be below the Finiteness Phrase; and a "low ForceP" will make Dravidian a typological oddity. 3 Readers unfamiliar with Dravidian languages might ask: Is ennǝ confined to the complements of 'verbs of saying'? It is not. The matrix verb can be any verb that takes a clausal complement, cf. (i) Mary [ John kaLLan aaNǝ ennǝ ] wiśwasiccu/ samśayiccu/ aaroopiccu Mary John thief is QUOT believed/ suspected/ alleged 'Mary believed/ suspected/ alleged that John is a thief.' But there is one restriction that needs to be noted on what ennǝ can take as its...

Language, 2013

Language, 2013

Mauritian Creole (MC) is a French lexifier creole with Kwa and Bantu substrate languages. In the early nineteenth century MC lost the French determiners le/la 'the' and du (partitive 'some'), often incorporating them into the noun stems, and became, in stark contrast to French, a language that allows bare count and mass nouns in argument positions. Diana Guillemin's book is dedicated to the documentation and theoretical analysis of that change, as well as the new system of determiners and quantifiers that subsequently emerged in MC. G is a native speaker of MC, but the study is primarily corpus-based, with over eighty text sources, ranging from eighteenthcentury documents to Baissac's ( , 1888 collections to recent internet posts. The analysis is carried out using current formal semantic and generative syntactic theories.

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 1992

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faculty.uaeu.ac.ae

2000

The most striking differences between the folk speech of Jamaica and the educated speech are not in the sounds, still less in the vocabulary-they are in the grammar, the functional patterns into which the words fall. It is also in this respect that the most fundamental influence from African backgrounds is to be seen, and that is why Jamaican folk speech is not a dialect in the same sense that the rural speech of Devonshire or Lancashire, say, are dialects of English. Those who would hold that Jamaican folk speech is not to be considered a type of English at all, but a new and different language, will find their strongest arguments here (…)' Frederic G. Cassidy Jamaica Talk (1961) 1. INTRODUCTION: GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF JC A structural property which is common amongst creole languages is their lack of overt morphological inflection. Bailey (1966) observes that : "One of the most striking features to be noted in any study of the Creole languages is that (…) their inflectional content is exceedingly meagre, so that the grammatical information is carried almost entirely by the syntactic system". We will see that Jamaican Creole is not an exception to this generalisation. 1.1. Absence of morphological inflection for nouns Nouns in JC are exempt of morphological structural case. To start with lexical DPs, we see that they appear in the same form regardless of whether they are assigned Nominative or Accusative case: (1) Di gyal nuh tan good none-at-all The girl [neg] behave good [neg] at all 'The girl doesn't behave well at all' (2) Im nuh gi di gyal nutn S/he [neg] give the girl nothing 'S/he doesn't give the girl anything' The situation is similar for pronominal DPs 1 : * My first word of thanks goes to Liliane Haegeman who has inspired me throughout my studies in linguistics and guided me through the writing of this dissertation. I am also indebted to Eric Haeberli for teaching me a vast majority of what I know in linguistics, as well as for reading this work and providing me with valuable suggestions. Thanks are also due to Enoch Aboh for useful comments and criticisms on the draft. Of course all remaining inadequacies are my own. Finally, many thanks to Evelyn Miller, Leah DePass, and Deborah DePass for informing me of their intuitions on the data here considered.

2016

The topic of this paper is the ki / ma alternation in Cape Verdean Creole (henceforth, CVC) with a focus on the behavior of ki within wh -questions. We argue that ki is a morphosyntactic reflex of Q-agreement between [ u Q] on C and a wh -phrase, supporting spec-head agreement in Chomsky (1991), contra the probe-goal agreement system in Chomsky (2000). In so doing, we provide evidence for its position in C and show that in the absence of operator movement and Q-agreement on C, an alternative particle, ma / kuma , appears in C. We show that the symmetric patterns of extraction observed in CVC where the complementizer ki can appear when either the subject or object are extracted, may be in part reducible to a contrast in locality constraints on Agree and can be better explained within a spec-head relation framework for CVC. O foco deste artigo e a alternância ki/ma em Crioulo de Cabo Verde (doravante, CVC), dedicando uma especial atencao ao comportamento do ki em interrogativas-wh. De...