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The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System
A case study of Mauritian creole
Within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalism and Formal Semantics, this work documents the development of the Mauritian Creole (MC) determiner system from the mid 18th century to the present. Guillemin proposes that the loss of the French quantificational determiners, which agglutinated to nouns, resulted in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions. This triggered a shift in noun denotation, from predicative in French to argumental in MC, and accounts for the very different determiner systems of the creole and its lexifier. MC nouns are lexically stored as Kind denoting terms, that share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals. New MC determiners are analyzed as ‘type shifting operators’ that shift Kinds into predicates, and serve to establish the referential properties of noun phrases. The analysis provides evidence for the universality of semantic features like Definiteness and Specificity, and the mapping of their form and function.
[Creole Language Library, 38] 2011. xviii, 310 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 26 October 2011
Published online on 26 October 2011
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements | pp. xvii–xviii
- Chapter 1. Sources of Mauritian Creole | pp. 1–6
- Chapter 2. Introduction | pp. 7–22
- Chapter 3. Syntactic framework | pp. 23–46
- Chapter 4. Semantics: Definitions and formalism | pp. 47–86
- Chapter 5. Early changes: From French to creole | pp. 87–116
- Chapter 6. The emergence of a new determiner system | pp. 117–162
- Chapter 7. The modern MC determiner system | pp. 163–198
- Chapter 8. Noun denotation and function of determiners | pp. 199–226
- Chapter 9. The syntax of the MC noun phrase | pp. 227–280
- Chapter 10. Conclusion | pp. 281–292
- Abbreviations and Symbols
- Texts (sources of examples)
- Index
“To the best of my knowledge, this is the only work in creolistics where the reader is presented with such a wide range of data that feeds into a very sophisticated analysis. […] On the description side, the data is presented in a very systematic manner using current tools in minimalism. While there is a body of literature on this issue in well-described languages, this domain of enquiry is virtually new in creolistics.”
Enoch Aboh, University of Amsterdam
“This work ‘recommends itself for various aspects to the attention of both the scientific community concerned with the historical study of creole languages and that interested in the theory of form and interpretation of noun phrases. Major strength points are the almost unprecedented riches of detailed diachronic data on the development of a creole language and the original attempt to address such data through the most sophisticated tools recently made available by formal grammar, both on the syntactic and the semantic side. Such tools are introduced to the reader from scratch, along with a wide number of useful bibliographical references, which are doubtless useful also for many scholars experienced in the field.”
Giuseppe Longobardi, University of Trieste
“This work 'addresses issues of the syntax-semantics interface such as the licensing of specificity, definiteness and number and its implications as to the distribution of (bare) noun phrases in Mauritian Creole (MC). In order to do this, the author first presents a fantastic semantic analysis of bare noun phrases and determiner noun phrases in MC, building on Longobardi (1994), Chierchia (1998) and much related work. […] I have no doubt that the finding of this work will open a new research agenda in creolistics’.”
Enoch Aboh, Professor of Linguistics, University of Amsterdam
“The data and the discussion of definiteness and specificity is an outstanding value of the book. G points to the Kwa and Bantu languages as ones that cut the cake the way MC does, but comparison with other languages that allow bare singulars to occur as arguments would also be most interesting. Some of those, such as Slavic languages, have no articles at all; others, like Hungarian and Hindi, have definite and/or indefinite articles. One hopes that the book under review will inspire a new wave of comparative studies, syntactic and semantic, in this area.”
Anna Szabolcsi, New York University, in Language
“Guillemin’s work on the Mauritian Creole determiner system is a great contribution not only to the field of general linguistics, but also to the debate on creole genesis and I expect it to be widely used by scholars in both fields.”
Chiara Truppi, Humboldt University Berlin, in Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 123(3): 293-298, 2013
Cited by (20)
Cited by 20 other publications
Albers, Ulrike
2025. Cognates of French articles in contemporary Reunion Creole. In New Perspectives on Mauritian Creole and Reunion Creole [Contact Language Library, 61], ► pp. 18 ff.
Alleesaib, Muhsina & Julie Lefort
2025. Introduction. In New Perspectives on Mauritian Creole and Reunion Creole [Contact Language Library, 61], ► pp. 1 ff.
López, Luis, Rodi Laanen, Charlotte Pouw & M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2025. Remarks on the syntax of bare nouns in Papiamentu. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 40:2 ► pp. 302 ff.
Peltier, Joy P. G.
Wiesinger, Evelyn & Muhsina Alleesaib
Stein, Peter
Szeto, Pui Yiu, Jackie Yan-ki Lai & Umberto Ansaldo
FitzGerald, Sarah
Alleesaib, Muhsina
Hassamal, Shrita, Anne Abeillé & Fabiola Henri
Kouwenberg, Silvia & John Victor Singler
Krämer, Philipp
2015. Review of Caid (2000): Étude comparée des systèmes verbaux en créole réunionnais et mauricien. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 30:1 ► pp. 184 ff.
Talić, Aida
Aboh, Enoch Oladé & Michel DeGraff
2014. Some notes on bare noun phrases in Haitian Creole and Gùngbè. In The Sociolinguistics of Grammar [Studies in Language Companion Series, 154], ► pp. 203 ff.
Guillemin, Diana
2014. Marking Definiteness or Specificity, not necessarily both. In Language Description Informed by Theory [Studies in Language Companion Series, 147], ► pp. 193 ff.
Guillemin, Diana
Guillemin, Diana
2025. Evidence of topic-prominence in Mauritian Creole. In New Perspectives on Mauritian Creole and Reunion Creole [Contact Language Library, 61], ► pp. 49 ff.
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