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A new look into relativization in Martinican
Minella Duzerol (DDL)

Relativization, the syntactic process through which a subordinate clause expresses a property attributed to a noun, is not well documented for Martinican, a French-based Creole of the French West Indies island of Martinique. Following a typological perspective, this paper describes the two strategies identified in Martinican: the syntactic gap and the resumptive pronoun. Then, it argues that the morpheme la, occurring at the end of relative clauses that modify semantically definite nouns, is different from the definite determiner la. Lastly, the distribution in discourse of the available strategies is examined, looking at both typological and sociolinguistic parameters.

The two parts of this presentation discuss (1) a proposal that sound change results from joint innovation in production rather than innovation by an individual followed by spread through a community, as many researchers suppose (Stevens & Harrington, 2014); and (2) a demonstration of the ways that sound change structures consonant inventories, with a focus on basic, elaborated and complex consonants (Lindblom & Maddieson, 1988). The examination of basic consonants delivers some rather surprising results with implications for the evolution of phonological systems (with Shelece Easterday).

References

Lindblom, B., & Maddieson, I. (1988). Phonetic universals in consonant systems. In Language, speech and mind. Studies in honour of Victoria A. Fromkin ed. by Charles Li and Larry M. Hyman (pp. 62–78). London: Routledge.

Stevens, M., & Harrington, J. (2014). The individual and the actuation of sound change. Loquens1, 1(1), 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/loquens.2014.003