School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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End date: 2010 × Start date: 2003 × Subject: creole ×

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    The emergence of a determiner system: the case of Mauritian Creole
    Guillemin, Diana (School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, 2007)
    In the early stages of creolization, a large number of French determiners incorporated into the nouns that they modified. The immediate consequence was that Mauritian Creole (MC) had only bare nouns with ambiguous interpretations between [±definite] singular and plural interpretations. Gradually, new determiners emerged to mark those semantic contrasts, but bare nouns still occur in the creole, with a definite singular interpretation in some syntactic environments, providing evidence for a phonologically null definite determiner, equivalent to the French definite article. Post-nominal ‘la’ in MC, which has been defined as a definite determiner, is argued to be a Specificity marker, which occurs only with referential NPs. The process of grammaticalization of new functional items in the determiner system was accompanied by changes in the syntax of the noun phrase from French to creole. A feature driven analysis within Chomsky’s Minimalist framework (1995, 2001) suggests that these changes were driven by the need to map semantic features onto the syntax.
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    Language contact interaction and possessive variation
    MCCONVELL, PATRICK (Monash University, 2005-11)
    This paper focuses on contact interaction in the development of possessive constructions. In contrast to ‘copying’ approaches to structural diffusion, contact interaction approaches recognise that internal and external models interact, often to produce innovation and variation. Some examples of this in possessive constructions from early English and pidgins and creoles are explored, including the question of ‘for’ and its equivalents becoming postposed including in Australian Creoles. Two theories of how adoption of structures from external sources can be staged and modified, that of Carol Myers-Scotton (the 4-M Model) and Ross’s Metatypy model are compared with examples from possessives, as well as Aikhenvald’s treatment of possessive construction diffusion in the Amazon. There appears to be common ground between these approaches, and the contact interaction approach in general.