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Testing Clause Boundaries: Focus and Complementation in Guadeloupean Creole | title | Testing Clause Boundaries: Focus and Complementation in Guadeloupean Creole |
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| start_date | 2025/10/20 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h30h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 124 & sur zoom |
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| summary | Guadeloupean Creole is spoken in the French overseas department of Guadeloupe, which has been historically minoritized and whose general linguistic descriptions (Bérnabe 1983, Damoiseau 2012, and Bonan 2013) lack in-depth empirical data on the behavior of its complementation structures. This study investigated the syntax of Guadeloupean Creole (GC) complementation; it involved the collection of experimental data on (i) the inclusion of the complementizer kè, and (ii) whether speakers allow focusing on noun phrases and verbs that are situated within a complement clause, as well as how two these phenomena interact. Focus in this language is notable in that it requires reduplication and fronting of focus-marked verbs, however, only fronting when focusing nouns (Byrne et al., 1993). Thus, one of the aims of this study is to examine factors that prohibit or allow the movement of a focused noun or verb across a complementizer phrase, which would appear to contrast with the notion that movement of a phrase to outside of a CP boundary is illicit (Haegeman 1991, Büring 2009).
We administered randomized Guadeloupean Creole (GC) acceptability judgment tasks to 34 bilingual native speakers of GC and French using PsychoPy2024.1.5, collecting 2,230 data points between the two experiments. In the first experiment, participants listened to audio prompts and chose between sentences with and without the complementizer included. Our second experiment tasked participants to listen to GC audio prompts with and without contrastive focus, after which they ranked the focus-marked sentence on a three-point acceptability scale. We also collected ethnographic interviews and oral narratives elicited with storyboards in both languages to compare our acceptability judgment tasks against natural usage, and to gather data on educational background, demographics, and other sociolinguistic factors that might affect focus-marking and complementizer usage.
Our results reveal a preference for focusing elements external to a CP, though a variety of factors contribute to the acceptability of focusing on CP-internal elements. These include the inclusion of the focus-marking morpheme “sé”, how agentive the noun is, the use of complementizers (Dixon 2006, Lohninger et al., 2020, and Tramutoli 2021), and whether the focused element moves to front the internal CP or the matrix CP. These findings suggest that focus movement of a noun or verb from inside a CP is indeed licit in Guadeloupean Creole, but relies on particular morphemes and the aligning of certain syntactic conditions to be acceptable. These findings lack any previous linguistic documentation in Guadeloupean Creole. Our research suggests that this particular Antillean Creole language layers multiple mechanisms of focus in a given phrase, and may have more transparent CP boundaries for focus movements when compared to traditional frameworks. We also found that there exists a contrast based on age in inclusion of the complementizer in complementation structures.
Our findings expand the descriptive grammar of GC and offer a detailed empirical basis for theorizing focus typology, movement barriers, and complementation in Creole languages. We aim not only to expand the descriptive grammar of GC, but to situate these novel findings within modern understandings of movement barriers, focus typology, the role of complementation, and the syntactic behavior of Antillean Creole syntactic phrases. |
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| responsibles | Cabredo Hofherr |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2025/10/07 11:39 UTC |
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