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The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System : a case study of Mauritian creole.
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 noun...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
John Benjamins Publishing Company
2011.
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| Colección: | Creole language library ;
v. 38. |
| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | 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. |
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| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (328) |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 1283314797 9781283314794 9786613314796 661331479X 9027284709 9789027284709 |