School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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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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    Women, houses, and plural objects?: homophony in the Mian Gender System
    Fedden, Sebastian (School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, 2007)
    This paper discusses two alternative analyses of the Mian gender system, which shows pervasive homophony in its gender/number markers, for instance the agreement forms for singular females and plural inanimates are identical. This form of syncretism across features is called polarity. The first analysis establishes four genders as agreement classes defined by sets of agreement markers: masculine, feminine, and two neuter genders. Second, a two-class system consisting of only a masculine and a feminine gender plus a distinction between animate and inanimate referents will be proposed. Such a two-gender system has to assume that for inanimates a switch in number can result in a switch in gender and vice versa. Because of this conflation of gender and number the two-gender analysis will be rejected for Mian in favour of the first.