Edited by Enoch O. Aboh, Norval Smith and Anne Zribi-Hertz
This is a new contribution to a theory of reiteration in natural languages, with a special focus on creoles. Reiteration is meant to denote any situation where the same form occurs (at least) twice within the boundaries of some linguistic domain. By including two case studies bearing on Hebrew and… read more
Describing a modern variety of Martinique Creole spoken by French-Creole bilinguals, we show that this language uses two different subgrammars to express ‘definiteness’, viz to signal a uniqueness presupposition on a discourse referent: (i) the enclitic determiner -la, arguably located in a… read more
This article bears on directional
Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in French-based creoles. Starting with a working definition of our topic of study, we present a detailed description of the data in Martinican Creole (MQ) – whose grammar is similar in the relevant respects to that of… read more
This article bears on VFD (Verb Fronting with Doubling) constructions in Haitian, whose left periphery contains a bare homonym of the lexical verb and which trigger a Verb-Focus effect. We seek to update the description of VFD and to reach a satisfactory analysis providing empirical support for… read more
Based on a comparative description of Haitian and French noun phrases, this study focuses on the notion of bareness which characterises so-called bare NPs. Lack of determiner is identified as one type of syntactic deficiency, which must be distinguished from Number deficiency. For any functional… read more
Abstract. The starting point of this paper is the apparent semantic symmetry between English and French pairs of examples like The name Mary, uses is not hers,/The name Mary, uses is not her, own and Le nom que Mariei utilise n est pas a ellezLe nom que Mariez utilise n'est pas le sienz. I will… read more
This paper attempts to show that, within a grammatical framework allowing for "empty nodes" in syntactic representations, a crucial theoretical distinction should be drawn between empty categories as defined in the Governement-and-Binding literature: pro, PRO, trace), and elliptical (or: zeugmatic)… read more
This article deals with the so-called "middle" reflexive construction (se-moyen) of French (e.g. Cette racine se mange, "this root is edible"). It is first postulated that se-moyen appears in early Romance — as shown by Stéfanini 1962 — as a variant of the Passive construction. A first,… read more
