The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System PDF Download

Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System PDF full book. Access full book title The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System by Diana Guillemin. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.

The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System

The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System PDF Author: Diana Guillemin
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027252602
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.