| Description |
1 online resource (328) |
| Series |
Creole language library ; v. 38 |
|
Creole language library ; v. 38.
|
| Contents |
The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System; Editorial page; Title page; LCC data; Dedication page; Table of contents; Acknowledgements; 1. Sources of Mauritian Creole; 1. Origins; 2. Language situation in Mauritius; 3. A corpus-based approach to the study of MC determiners; 4. Outline of this work; 2. Introduction; 1. Why the determiner system?; 1.1 A quantificational approach; 2. Early changes from French to MC; 3. The new MC determiner system; 4. Syntactic framework; 4.1 A rationale for Minimalism; 4.2 The Determiner Phrase; 5. Semantics of determiners; 5.1 Definitions |
| Summary |
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 |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
English |
| Subject |
Creole dialects, French -- Mauritius -- Grammar
|
|
FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY -- French.
|
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Creole dialects, French -- Grammar
|
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Mauritius
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| Form |
Electronic book
|
| LC no. |
2011026798 |
| ISBN |
1283314797 |
|
9781283314794 |
|
9786613314796 |
|
661331479X |
|
9027284709 |
|
9789027284709 |
|
