Predicate Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

There is a morpheme li in Mauritian Creole (MC), which is homophonous with the 3sg pronoun (meaning 'he', 'she', 'it', 'him', 'her'), and which, in the early creole, occurs frequently between the subject and the predicate in affirmative, present tense clauses. It occurred only with count nouns, and initially served to mark the subject as singular and referential. Following the loss of the French determiner system in the early stages of creolization, the new language lacked determiners to mark these semantic features on NPs. I propose that li may have originated as a resumptive pronoun, co-referential with the subject, but following the grammaticalization of new determiner elements to mark the semantic contrasts of [±definite] and singular vs. plural, li has now grammaticalized into a predicate marker (PM). Its presence is sensitive to both the nature of the predicate, and to the definiteness and specificity features of the subject NP. It now occurs only in non-tensed affirmative clauses, to provide a source of quantification when there are no other sentential operators to bind variables. My analysis is within the framework of Truth Conditional Semantics, where indefinite NPs are analyzed as variables that get introduced into the discourse, and must be bound by an operator to yield a closed proposition, with a truth value. Drawing on a comparison with a cognate morpheme i in Seychellois Creole, I claim that its path to grammaticalization is linked to that of the specificity marker la. This paper is organized as follows: Section 1 is a brief overview of the MC determiners which emerged following the collapse of the French determiner system. In Section 2, I look at the occurrence and distribution of li in the early creole, and the gradual bleaching of its semantic features. Section 3 comprises my theoretical framework and the definition of terms used for my analysis. In Section 4 I explain the distribution and behaviour of li in modern MC. In Section 5 I look at the occurrence of the cognate morpheme i in Seychellois Creole, which patterns differently from MC li. Section 6 concludes this paper.