The syntax and semantics of a determiner system : a case study of Mauritian Creole
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Bibliographic Information
The syntax and semantics of a determiner system : a case study of Mauritian Creole
（Creole language library, v. 38）
John Benjamins, c2011
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Includes bibliographical references (p. [295]-306) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
- 1. Acknowledgements
- 2. Chapter 1. Sources of Mauritian Creole
- 3. Chapter 2. Introduction
- 4. Chapter 3. Syntactic framework
- 5. Chapter 4. Semantics: Definitions and formalism
- 6. Chapter 5. Early changes: From French to creole
- 7. Chapter 6. The emergence of a new determiner system
- 8. Chapter 7. The modern MC determiner system
- 9. Chapter 8. Noun denotation and function of determiners
- 10. Chapter 9. The syntax of the MC noun phrase
- 11. Chapter 10. Conclusion
- 12. Abbreviations and Symbols
- 13. Texts (sources of examples)
- 14. Index
by "Nielsen BookData"