The syntax and semantics of a determiner system: A case study of Mauritian Creole by Diana Guillemin (review)

Mauritian Creole (MC) is a French lexifier creole with Kwa and Bantu substrate languages. In the early nineteenth century MC lost the French determiners le/la 'the' and du (partitive 'some'), often incorporating them into the noun stems, and became, in stark contrast to French, a language that allows bare count and mass nouns in argument positions. Diana Guillemin's book is dedicated to the documentation and theoretical analysis of that change, as well as the new system of determiners and quantifiers that subsequently emerged in MC. G is a native speaker of MC, but the study is primarily corpus-based, with over eighty text sources, ranging from eighteenth-century documents to Baissac's (1880, 1888) collections to recent internet posts. The analysis is carried out using current formal semantic and generative syntactic theories.

The interest of the work is manifold. One of the highlights is the study of specificity vs. definiteness in a language that lacks an overt definite article. MC diverges from its lexifier and resembles its substrate languages, which have been observed tomark specificity, rather than definiteness. To illustrate, consider the example in 1 (simplified from ex. 22 on p. 125): bare count nouns may be interpreted either as indefinite or as definite by virtue of uniqueness, but postnominal là serves to encode anaphoric definiteness, which G qualifies as [+definite, +specific].As G notes, 'The use of là serves to recall the topic, and once it is established that lacorde is the subject of the discourse, a bare noun can be used again' (125).

1. 1. Alle çace to      lacorde,... Baleine amarre lacorde dans ... so      laquée...
   go  fetch 2SG.POSS rope      whale  tie    rope    in      3SG.POSS tail
   Lacorde là vine      raide... Lacorde péte éne coup!
   rope      SP become stiff      rope      snap one time
   'Go fetch your rope, ... Whale ties the rope to its tail ... The rope stiffens ... The rope suddenly snaps!'

Ch. 1, 'Sources of Mauritian Creole', is a brief introduction to the origins of MC and an outline of the work. Ch. 2, 'Introduction', introduces the early changes from French to MC and the new determiner system. In addition to the above-mentioned loss or incorporation of the French determiners, MC lost the French copula and the case-assigning prepositions à 'to, for' and de 'of', giving rise to a massive [+/-definite] and [+/-plural] ambiguity in argumental bare nouns. The new determiner system includes the indefinite singular marker enn, the postnominal specificity marker là, the old demonstrative sa that is now in combination with là, the plural marker bann (from bande 'group') that is in complementary distribution with numerals, the phonetically null definite article notated as d, and so, a possessive pronoun reanalyzed as an emphatic determiner, equivalent to the English and French definite articles in associative anaphoric contexts in terms of Hawkins 1978. The chapter situates the study within the minimalist program and the hypothesis of universal grammar, and points to its specific syntactic and semantic backgrounds.

Ch. 3, 'Syntactic framework', provides a general introduction to the assumptions broadly underlying minimalist syntax and lays out the architecture of the MC noun phrase. Following Chierchia's (1998) argumental vs. predicative parameter for initial noun denotations, the major change in MC that enabled the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions is a parametric switch from predicative to kind-denoting, argumental nouns. The noun phrase is assigned the following multilayered structure, from the bottom up: NP, NumP (headed by [+count] and hosting enn, bann, or numerals in its specifier), DemP (headed by [+deictic] and hosting sa in its specifier), PossP, DefP (with the null head δ), and finally, SpP (headed by [+specific] Ø or là). Head movements (N-to-Num in count noun phrases, and N-to-Def in mass ones) will be followed by the phrasal movement of NumP or DefP to the specifier of SpP, giving rise to...