While universally present in languages, negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages, however, negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language, generally… read more
Edited by José Camacho, Nydia Flores-Ferrán, Liliana Sánchez, Viviane Déprez and María José Cabrera
This volume presents selected papers from the 36th LSRL conference held at Rutgers University in 2006. It contains twenty-two articles of current approaches to the study of Romance linguistics. Well-known researchers present their findings in areas such as of syntax and semantics, phonology,… read more
The experimental literature on the pragmatic abilities of bilinguals is rather sparse. The only study investigating adult second language (L2) learners (Slabakova, 2010) found an increase of pragmatic responses in that population relative to monolinguals. The results of studies on early… read more
In addition to plurality, creole plural morphemes impart an additional meaning of definiteness or specificity to the nominal expressions they mark. As of yet, there is no precise characterization either empirical or theoretical of the semantic/pragmatic dimensions they convey. Furthermore, the… read more
Negative sentences in Creole languages, provocatively claimed to be the world ‘simplest languages’ (Mc Whorter 2001), commonly present a puzzling multiplicity of redundant negative expressions with a single negative interpretation that appear to systematically violate logical compositionality. An… read more
Evidence that DN readings arise in solid NC languages more than previously thought (Déprez et al. 2015) underscore the importance of investigating the factors governing their emergence to deepen our understanding of Negative Concord. This paper examines the roles of context and prosody in… read more
Two empirical predictions derive from current accounts of Strict Negative Concord; either their NCI should be universal expressions out-scoping negation, or their doubling negation should be expletive. Based on a comparative analysis of Strict NC in Haitian Creole (HC) and Mauritian Creole (MC),… read more
We present experimental evidence bearing on Cheng and Rooryck’s (2000) proposal that French wh-in-situ questions are licensed by an intonational morpheme also present in yes-no questions and their claim that such questions are ungrammatical without a rising contour. While most participants produced… read more
Based on a thorough review of their feature make up and on novel diachronic data on their modification properties, this paper maps out the internal syntactic structure of French n-words and the historical time course of their internal rise within a nominal projection. It charts out precise steps… read more
To explain the diverse distribution of determiners in French Based Creoles (FBC) a formal model of grammaticalization is proposed in which grammaticalization is taken to encode a change in the interpretability of one or more of the features in a lexical item. Here interpretability is understood as… read more
The paper offers a comparative study of the syntactic structure of nominal constituents in French Lexifier Creoles (FLC). In spite of the superficial variability observed in the distribution of FLC determiners, the paper argues that FLC have a common functional architecture and presents both… read more
The paper explores and compares the distributions and interpretations of nominal expressions without determiner (bare nouns) in a number of French based creole and in one Portuguese based creole, Cape Verdean creole. The goal of this exploration is to determine on the one hand whether the range of… read more
Bouchard (2002) proposes that the syntactic position of number — on N or D — affects three aspects of nominal syntax: adjective-order, nounomission and Bare Argument Nominals (BAN). This paper shows that number position incorrectly predicts these nominal properties in some languages, i.e. the… read more
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… read more
Haitian Creole has been argued to be a pro-drop language whose null subjects are licensed by syntactic clitics (DeGraff 1993). This paper analyzes the properties of Haitian Creole pronominal subjects, expletive and argumentai, and argues on the basis of syntactic, phonological, and comparative… read more
