A Contrastive Study of Sentential Negation in Martinican, Haitian and Mauritian Creoles, and French: the Case of Pa, Pèsonn and Ayen

Ludovic Mompelat

A contrastive study of sentential negation in Martinican, Haitian and Mauritian Creoles, and French: The case of pa, pèsonn and ayen.

Abstract

This study seeks to offer a comparative analysis of the syntactic properties of negative words (n-words) ayen ‘nothing’ and pèsonn ‘nobody’ (Laka 1990) and the negative marker pa ‘not’ in Martinican Creole, using previous research on Haitian and Mauritian Creoles

(Syea, 2013; DeGraff 1993). Martinican Creole (Mar), Haitian Creole (Hai), and Mauritian

Creole (Mau) are French-based Creole languages (FBCs) whose lexifier language is

French. Given the common lexical and morphological baseline of these varieties of Creole, a comparative study of lexical items—here negative expressions—sheds light on their syntactic behaviors, as well as on syntactic differences between a Creole language and a lexifier language. Indeed, although Creole languages inherit many of their lexical items from a lexifier language, there is no reason to assume that cognate lexical items between a

Creole language and lexifier language or among the different Creole languages will display the same syntactic properties. In the current study, we will compare the negative marker pa present in the three Creoles with the French lexical cognate pas and French negative particle ne in order to give a comprehensive syntactic description of these lexical items.

We will also describe the syntactic behavior of the negative words ayen/anyen/naryen

‘nothing’ and pèsonn/pesonn/personn ‘nobody’, respectively in Mar, Hai, and Mau, in comparison with their French cognates rien and personne, respectively. This study will provide the first treatment of sentential negation in Mar and will also allow us to observe how syntactically divergent FBC languages may be from one another and from French with regards to the syntax of sentential negation.

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1. Introduction

The syntax of negation is a well-studied topic in English and for many natural languages

(Ladusaw 1979, Horn 1989, Giannakidou 2002, 2011, Haegeman 1995, Jespersen 1917,

Laka 1990, Zanuttini 1991), especially in French (Corblin and Tovena 2003, Déprez 1990,

1997, 2000, Larrivée 2014, Kayne 1975, Rowlett 1998, Hirschbühler and Labelle 1992,

Moritz and Valois 1993). Similarly, the syntactic properties of (French-based) Creoles have been subject to numerous studies comparing a wide variety of syntactic elements and behaviors with those found in their respective lexifier language (Déprez 2000, DeGraff

1993, Newman 1985, Rottet 1993, Vaillant 2016, Valdman 1978, Lefebvre 1974, Klinger

1992, Bickerton 1975). The current study seeks to give a generative treatment of negation and n-words in Martinican Creole (Mar) based off the works of Syea (2013) for Mauritian

Creole (Mau), and DeGraff (1993) and Déprez (2000) for Haitian Creole (Hai). Very little exists in the way of theoretical or even descriptive studies of Mar and a comparative analysis of French and the three French-based Creoles will allow us to outline properties which are specific to Mar. The focus of this comparison will be the description of the similarities and differences in the syntactic properties of the French negative markers pas

‘not’, and its French Creole (Mau, Mar, Hai) cognate pa as well as the similarities and differences in the syntactic and semantic properties of the negative words ayen/anyen/naryen ‘nothing’ and pèsonn/pesonn/personn ‘no one’, respectively in Mar,

Hai, and Mau, in comparison with their French cognates rien and personne. In Section 1, we will review the literature surrounding negative words and the two ways such items can express negation, namely as negative polarity items (NPIs) or as universal negative quantifiers (Zanuttini 1989, 1991). This will, in turn, allow us to properly define negative concord (NC) and double negation (DN) languages as these notions are at the core of the

Ludovic Mompelat similarities and differences that we will investigate between FBCs and French. Indeed, while FBCs are NC languages, French is considered to have both NC and DN properties

(see section 1.5). In Section 2, we will give an analysis of the syntactic behaviors of the lexical items selected for this study, starting first with comparing the negative marker pa

(Mau, Hai, Mar) to the negative markers pas/ne (French) and then comparing the negative words personne ‘nobody’ and rien ‘nothing’(French) with ayen/pèsonn (Mar), anyen/pesonn (Hai), and naryen/personn (Mau).

2. Review of the literature

2.1 Negative words (n-words)

The concept of negative words (n-word), as described by Laka (1990), originates from a phenomenon observed in Romance languages (Standard Italian, Catalan, Portuguese and other Romance varieties) in which words like nadie seem to behave in two different ways in two different syntactic positions. They either behave like polarity items, in that they are required to be licensed by negation, or they behave like universal quantifiers and carry their own negative meaning. The examples below illustrate this distinction.

1) a) no vino nadie. not came anybody ‘nobody came’ b) *vino nadie came anybody (‘nobody came’) c) nadie vino nobody came ‘Nobody came’ d) nadie no vino nobody not came ‘nobody didn’t come’

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In (1a) and (1b), nadie is in object position and acts as a polarity item and requires licensing by the negative marker no otherwise the sentence is ungrammatical as shown in (1b). In

(1c) and (1d), nadie is in subject position and acts as a negative quantifier and does not require licensing by a negative marker since it carries the negative meaning of the clause on its own. Thus, we see in (1d) that since nadie possesses its own negative meaning and, here, co-occurs with the negative marker no, which also possesses its own negative meaning, the sentence yields a positive interpretation namely “everybody came”. In

Romance varieties, there exists a series of elements behaving as such (nada ‘anything’, ‘at all’, ningún ‘any’, nunca ‘ever’, ni ‘either’, etc.), and since most of them begin with ‘n-’,

Laka (1990) refers to these elements as n-words.

The notion of n-word has been widely adopted in the literature surrounding NC languages, and it is important to distinguish the two ways in which n-words can express negation and which play a role in the opposition between NC and DN languages (see section 1.4). The first one is represented by NPIs that we will present in the next section.

2.2 Negative polarity items

NPIs can occur in negative contexts (2), in which they take a negative reading, or in non- assertive contexts (3-4) in which they take an indefinite reading (Zanuttini 1989, 1991). It is important to note that, in a language like English, NPIs (anything, anybody, etc.) are lexically distinct from the universal negative quantifier set (nothing, nobody, etc.).

Consider (2-4) from English:

(2) I didn’t do anything. (negative context) = I did nothing (3) I wish I could do anything to help you. (non-assertive context) = I wish I could do something [whatever it is] to help you

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(4) Did you do anything today ? (non-assertive context) = did you do something [whatever it is] today?

In (2), only a negative reading is possible for standard English with anything meaning

‘nothing’ because the NPI is in the scope of negation, namely the negative marker not, and thus takes a negative reading. In (3) and (4), anything is not in the scope of negation, is found in non-assertive contexts, and has an indefinite reading which can be paraphrased as

“something [whatever it is]”. We notice that the interpretation of anything in (2) cannot be applied to (3) and (4), and vice versa. Furthermore, although NPIs can occur in non- assertive contexts, they cannot, however, occur in assertive/positive contexts, since they do not have an assertive/positive meaning as shown in (5):

(5) *I did anything today. ≠I did something today/*I did something [whatever it is] today/*I did nothing today Finally, an NPI cannot output a negative meaning if used in isolation.

(6) Q: What did you do? A: #Anything.

In response to the question in (6), anything cannot mean ‘nothing’. An NPI’s meaning is, thus, dependent on the polarity and the properties of the context in which it is found, namely whether negative or non-assertive. This last point introduces the other type of n- words playing a role in negative concord, namely, universal negative quantifiers, to which I now turn.

2.3 Universal Negative quantifiers

Universal negative quantifiers represent the second type of n-words (Zanuttini 1991).

They are expressions which have typical negative properties in any context they occur

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(Corblin and Tovena 2003: 1-2) and carry a negative meaning on their own (Laka 1990 :

107). For example, in English:

(7) I saw nobody (8) I like nothing

In (7) and (8), the negative quantifiers nobody and nothing carry alone the negative property of the clause and, in this way, differ from NPIs, which need the support of a negative licenser whether it be a negative quantifier or a negative marker. Moreover, since negative quantifiers carry a sentential negative force, if taken in isolation, they still yield a negative reading. Thus, in (9):

(9) Q: What did you do? A: Nothing.

Nothing in isolation does accurately mean “not a thing” and preserves its negative reading.

Now that we have introduced the notions of n-words, NPIs and negative quantifiers, we are able to define the notions of negative concord (NC) languages and how they differ from double negation (DN) languages as we will see in the next section.

2.4 Negative concord vs double negation languages

When looking at sentential negation cross-linguistically, there exist1 two types of languages, negative concord languages (NC) and double negation languages (DN)

(Zeijlstra 2004). An NC language is defined as “a clause-internal combination of elements that can independently induce a semantic negation which, together, only yield one semantic negation.” (Zeijlstra 2009 : 447). In comparison, a DN language yields a positive reading

1 Déprez (2011) and Blanchette (2017) disagree with Zeijlstra (2004) and argue that languages do not exhibit either NC or DN properties/readings but encompass both. Natural languages would then not inherently be NC or DN languages, but rather it would be the idiosyncratic micro-parameters as well as syntactic configurations which decide the interpretations. For this study, we will use Zeijlstra’s definitions of NC and DN.

Ludovic Mompelat if two (or an even number of) negative markers or quantifiers are present in the same clause and in the same scope. Let us look at (10-11), which show the possible interpretations from a DN language such as standard English (Laka, 1990) and a NC language such as African

American Vernacular English (AAVE) (Veenendaal et al. 2014):

(10) a) *John didn’t see nobody. (Standard English) = John saw somebody. b) *Nobody saw nothing. (Standard English) = Everybody saw something. (11) a) John didn’t see nobody. (AAVE) = John didn’t see anybody b) Nobody saw nothing. (AAVE) = Nobody saw anything

In (10) whether the two negative elements are a negative marker not and a negative quantifier nobody (10a) or the two negative elements are two negative quantifiers, here nobody and nothing (10b), in standard English the interpretation for both sentences yields a positive reading. (10a) can only mean “It is not the case that John saw nobody” (i.e., John saw somebody) rather than “John didn’t see anybody.” (10b) means “There is no person such that this person saw nothing” (i.e, everybody has seen something) rather than “No one saw anything.” In AAVE, however, the interpretation of (11a) and (11b) is negative, respectively meaning “John didn’t see anybody” and “No one saw anything.” (in Standard

English).

The notions of NC and DN languages are at the center of the main difference between French and FBCs regarding sentential negation. Hai and Mau are considered NC languages whereas standard French is at the crossroads between NC and DN languages.

We will be looking at a comparison of Standard French, Hai, and Mau as presented by

Déprez (2000), DeGraff (1993), and Syea (2013).

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2.5 French as a NC/DN language

French is somewhere between an NC language and a DN one because, in French, two negative quantifiers found in the same scope can give rise to either a positive or negative reading. Let us take (12) as an example (Rooryck 2017 : 13):

(12) Personne (n’)2 aime personne. (NC/DN) Nobody (NE) loves nobody. ‘Nobody loves anyone” or “Everyone loves someone’

In French, the sentence in (12) can have two acceptable readings, one negative and one positive but it is necessary to point out that the most readily available interpretation is the negative reading (via negative concord). Corblin et al. (2004) observe that one can enhance and yield a double negation reading by stressing one of the two n-words, since “stress takes the stressed n-word out of the scope domain of negation” (Rooryck 2017 : 14) leading to the presence of negative doubling in the clause with both negative quantifiers keeping their respective negative force (instead of concording). However, despite the evidence in (12), in French the presence of an n-word (like personne, rien) with the negative marker pas leads to sentences acceptable only under narrow pragmatic conditions and only yielding a positive reading (double negation) (Muller 1991 : 258) , as in (13-14):

(13) a) ?Jean (n’) a pas vu personne. (NC*/DN) John (NE) has not seen nobody. b) Jean (n’) a vu personne. (NC/DN*) John (NE) has seen nobody. (14) a) ?Jean (n’) a pas rien vu. (NC*/DN) John (NE) has not nothing seen b) Jean (n’) a rien vu. (NC/DN*) John (NE) has nothing seen

2 In conversational/colloquial European French, the negative marker ne is optional and is most of the time elided (Martineau and Déprez 2004). In Québec French, ne is completely omitted (Labelle 2019)

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According to Déprez (2000), n-words in French have their own quantificational force, meaning that negating a French negative quantifier “is equivalent to negating a zero numeral” (p.268). Thus, when pas appears with another negative quantifier wherever the position of the latter, the sentence yields a DN reading, such as “It is not the case that John saw no one” for (13a) and “It is not the case that John saw nothing” for (14a). Negative doubling (with a negative marker and an n-word) in French is only acceptable under narrow pragmatic conditions (Déprez 2000 : 261, Muller 1991 : 258). The same sentences without pas but with ne, as in (13b) and (14b), on the other hand, only yield a negative concord reading only. Thus, French is not a prototypical NC language since there are contexts in which two n-words yield a positive interpretation (13-14) and it is not a prototypical DN language because two negative quantifiers may co-occur, unlike Standard English (10b), and output a preferred interpretation that is an NC/negative one (12). For this study, we will not give any more details as to the nature of French sentential negation.

2.6 Creole languages as NC languages

Hai and Mau are NC languages because of the systematic negative reading that arises when two negative words, whether they be a negative marker like pa and an n-word like pèsonn/personn ‘nobody’ and anyen/naryen ‘nothing’, or two n-words, occur in the same scope domain.

(15) a) Personne/rien n’ est (*pas) venu. (French) (NC) Nobody/nothing (NE) is not come. ‘Nobody/nothing came’ b) Pèsonn/anyen *(pa) vini. (Hai) (NC/DN*) c) Personn/naryen *(pa) vinn. (Mau) (NC/DN*) Nobody/nothing PA come

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In (15b) and (15c) the only available reading is an NC one, with both sentences meaning

“Nobody came”. In both Creoles, the n-words are licensed by pa, which shows the opposite tendency from French, where pas can only occur with the negative operator ne and cannot co-occur with other n-words as in (13a), (14a), (15a) in order to yield a negative reading.

From this first observation, it seems that in Haitian and Mau, the negative marker pa functions more like the French negative marker ne rather than pas. We will dig further into the differences between French pas/ne, and Creole pa in our analysis section. Now that we have reviewed the notions of NPIs, negative quantifiers, Negative Concord, and Double

Negation, we will consider the case of Mar and where it stands compared to French, Hai, and Mau.

3. Analysis

3.1 Pa vs Pas

In our analysis of negation in Mar, we first need to look at the distribution of the Creole negative marker pa in comparison to its French counterpart pas. In Mau, negation is expressed by the negative marker pa which precedes the verb whether the verb is finite or non-finite as shown below in (16-17) (Syea, 2013 : 137) :

(16) a) Li pa konn zot. (Mau) he PA know them ‘He doesn’t know them.’ b) Zot pa al sinema. they PA go cinema ‘They don’t go to the cinema’ c) Li p’ ena kamarad. he PA have friend ‘He doesn’t have any friends.’ (17) a) Mo prefer pa ale. (Mau) I prefer PA go ‘I prefer not to go.’

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b) Pa al lekol pa bon. PA go school not good ‘Not attending school is not good.’

Concurrently, in Mau, when the verb is preceded by a tense marker, pa (like ne) precedes both the verb and the tense marker (auxiliary in French) (Syea 2013: 138) as shown below in (18-20):

(18) a) nu pa ti al sinema. (Mau) we not TNS3 go cinema ‘We didn’t go to the cinema.’ b) zot pa finn travay yer. they PA ASP4 work yesterday ‘They haven’t worked yesterday’ (19) a) *nu ti pa al sinema. We TNS PA go cinema b) *zot finn pa travay yer. They ASP PA work yesterday (20) a) Nous ne sommes pas allés au cinéma. (French) We (NE) are not go.pp5 to cinema ‘We didn’t go to the cinema’ b) *Nous sommes ne pas allés au cinéma. We are (NE) not go.pp to-the cinema c) Nous n’ avons pas travaillé hier. We (NE) have not work.pp yesterday. ‘We haven’t worked yesterday.’ d) *Nous avons ne pas travaillé hier. We have (NE) not work.pp yesterday.

The sentences in (15b) and (16-19) exhibit a syntactic distribution of Mau pa closer to

French ne rather than its French cognate pas, in preverbal position, but “[not] in non-finite clauses where […] [, in French,] pas precede[s] the verb” (Syea, 2013 : 137). Thus, in Mau, pa must precede the verb and tense marker, if one is present, (18-19), the same way ne must in French (20).

3 TNS = Tense marker 4 ASP = Aspect marker 5 pp = past participle

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In Hai, DeGraff (1993) also analyzes the distribution of the negative marker pa compared to pas in French and not in English. He shows that pa also precedes the verb whether finite or non-finite and shows a syntactic behavior closer to French ne rather than pas. Moreover, similarly to (18-20) for Mau, DeGraff posits that while French pas and

English not can appear within the sequence auxiliary + main verb, it is not possible for pa in Hai, as shown below in (21)(DeGraff 1993 : 6) :

(21) a) Jan pa t av ale nan mache. (Hai) Jan PA TNS MOOD go in market ‘John would not have gone to the market’ b) *Jan te pa (av) ale nan mache. Jan TNS PA MOOD go in market c) *Jan (t) ava pa ale nan mache. Jan TNS MOOD PA go in market d) *Jan (t) (av) ale pa nan mache. Jan TNS MOOD go PA in market (22) a) Jean ne serait pas allé au marché. (French) Jean (NE) would-be not go.pp to-the market ‘John would not have gone to the market.’ b) Jean n’ était pas allé au marché. Jean (NE) was not go.pp to-the market ‘John had not gone to the market.’ c) Jean n’ ira pas au cinéma. Jean (NE) go.FUT not at-the cinema. ‘John will not go to the movies.’

DeGraff (1993) argues that the distinction between (21) and (22) may not be solely due to structural differences between pas and pa and explains the contrast between (21) and (22) by way of Pollock’s (1989) theory on verb movement. This theory argues that “ [in French,] the verb stem undergoes cyclic-successive head movement to various inflectional heads in order to collect its inflectional suffixes” whereas Hai (and, similarly, most FBCs) has

“virtually no inflectional morphology” which, thus, accounts for the absence of verb movement in (21) since the “Haitian Creole tense-mood-aspect markers are independent

Ludovic Mompelat morphemes which precede the main verb” (DeGraff, 1993 : 66) and are not affixes like in

French.

Since the evidence in (21) and (22) is not sufficient to posit that pa and pas are, indeed, not structural equivalents, DeGraff uses n-words like pèsonn/anyen to provide empirical evidence. Indeed, French pas and Creole pa seem to interact differently with these n-words, both syntactically and semantically. While the former in French, if found with these n- words, would yield a double negation reading (13-14) only under specific pragmatic considerations, the latter in FBCs would yield totally acceptable and standard sentences with an NC reading.

Thus, the first account would be the DN reading in French if pas co-occurs with an n- word such as personne or rien as in (23) :

(23) a) ??Personne n’ est pas venu. (French) nobody (NE) is not come. ‘Everybody came’ (lit. “Nobody has not come.”) b) ?Je n’ ai pas vu personne. I (NE) have not seen nobody. ‘I saw nobody’ (lit. “I did not see nobody”) c) Ce n’ est pas rien. It (NE) is not nothing ‘This is something’ (lit. “This is not nothing.”)

It is important to point out the fact that in (23), in Standard French, there are various degrees of acceptability with (23a), and the n-word scoping over the negative marker, being the least acceptable in any context, (23b), and the negative marker scoping over the n-word, being acceptable only in very specific pragmatic situations to purposefully yield a positive reading, and (23c), with rien6 in the scope of pas, being exceptionally totally acceptable

(Muller 1991 : 258-259). While we will not further investigate this difference in

6 For more details on the syntactic difference between French personne and rien see Rowlett (1998, ch. 5)

Ludovic Mompelat acceptability degrees, the sentences in (23) as well as those in (13-14) indicate that one would usually avoid using pas with other n-words in French. In Hai, however, pa needs to co-occur with n-words. Otherwise, the sentences would be considered ungrammatical:

(24) a) Pèsonn *(pa) vini. (Hai) Nobody PA come ‘Nobody has come’ b) Mwen *(pa) wè pèsonn. I PA see nobody ‘I haven’t seen anybody’ c) Sa *(pa) anyen. 3SG PA nothing. ‘This is nothing’

With pa-support, sentences (24a-c) yield an NC reading and are clearly interpreted as negative statements.

3.2 Pa versus ne

Looking at negative concord, we can posit that Creole pa behaves like the negative marker ne in French where the presence of ne and n-words, namely negative quantifiers, in French, yields a negative reading (DeGraff 1993 : 68):

(25) a) Personne n’ est venu. (French) (NC/DN*) Nobody (NE) is come. ‘Nobody has come.’ b) Je n’ ai vu personne. (NC/DN*) I (NE) have seen nobody ‘I haven’t seen anybody.’ c) Ce n’ est rien. (NC/DN*) It (NE) is nothing “This is nothing”

Moreover, in French and in Hai, ne and pa can also have scope over more than one negative quantifier, whether in preverbal or postverbal position, and the sentence would yield a negative concord reading as in (26) :

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(26) a) Nan katye sa-a pèsonn pa di pèsonn anyen. (Hai) in neighborhood DEM-SG nobody PA say nobody nothing b) Dans ce quartier, personne ne dit rien à personne. in this neighborhood, nobody (NE) says nothing to nobody ‘In this neighborhood, nobody says anything to anybody.’

3.3 Negation in Martinican Creole

Now focusing on Mar, we notice many similarities between this language and Hai/Mau in terms of the distribution of pa. Mar follows exactly the patterns shown above for the other two varieties of Creoles. Indeed, in Mar n-words must co-occur with the negative marker pa otherwise the sentence would be ungrammatical as shown in (27) :

(27) a) Zan *(pa) wè pèsonn. (Mar) John *(pa) see nobody ‘John hasn’t seen anyone’ b) Zan *(pa) lé di mwen ayen. John *(pa) want tell me nothing ‘John doesn’t want to tell me anything’

Moreover, pa in Mar can have scope over more than one n-word (whether pre- or postverbal) as we can see in (28) :

(28) a) Zan *(pa) di pèsonn ayen. (Mar) John *(PA) tell nobody nothing ‘John hasn’t told anyone anything’ b) Pèsonn *(pa) di pèsonn ayen. Nobody *(PA) tell nobody nothing ‘No one has told anyone anything’ c) Pèsonn *(pa) di Zan ayen. Nobody *(PA) tell John nothing. ‘No one has told John anything.’ d) Pèsonn *(pa) di pèsonn lavérité. Nobody *(PA) tell nobody truth. ‘No one has told anyone the truth’

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However, one difference between French ne and Creole pa in the three varieties of

Creole is that the latter must not be elided and needs to stay overt otherwise the sentences in (16), (17), (24) and (27-28) would be ungrammatical. This difference stems from the fact that ne has become a negative particle and a weak morpheme, in other words a clitic.

In Modern French, it is often elided in colloquial standard French and more generally in

Québec French (Labelle 2019, Martineau and Déprez 2004). Ne deletion in colloquial standard French and in Quebec French is better represented through the French Jespersen’s cycle (Jespersen 1917). This cycle, set in 5 stages, is used to describe the historical evolution of sentential negation and of the semantic/pragmatic properties of ne and pas.

“[We] go from Old and Middle French, where “ne” was the sole marker of

clausal negation (jeo ne sais -- stages 1 and 2), to standard French, where “ne”

co-occurs with the negative word “pas” (je ne sais pas – Stage 3 ), to colloquial

French, where “ne” is omissible (je (ne) sais pas – Stage 4), to Quebec French

and similar varieties, where “ne” has disappeared (Je sais pas – Stage 5). Stage

5, featuring a single marker of clausal negation, “pas”, completes the cycle”

(Labelle 2019 : 155)

Thus, on the one hand, ne semantically evolved from being the main negative marker and a strong morpheme capable of carrying the negative force of a whole clause (Stages 1 and

2) to a negative particle and a weak morpheme that is omissible (Stage 4 in colloquial

French) or that completely disappears (Stage 5 in Quebec French). On the other hand, pa is considered stronger than ne since it can express negation and carry the negative force of a clause on its own as shown in (29a-b).

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(29) a) Jean (*n’) achète des fleurs. (French) John (NE) buys some flowers b) Zan *(pa) achte flè. (Hai) c) Zan *(pa) achtè flè. (Mar) John PA buy flower ‘John doesn’t buy flowers’

With this analysis in mind, DeGraff gives a structure at the DS and SS levels7, based off the work of Pollock (1989), where ne is the head-NegP8 which then moves to preverbal position by head-movement into a head higher than NegP as presented in (30) (DeGraff

1993 :70):

(30)

We see here that ne’s position after movement is in head of TP/IP9 along with the main verb “motivated by its clitic nature” (DeGraff 1993: 70).

Since FBCs show an absence of movement from V to T for main verbs, and since pa does not share the clitic nature of ne (since it is a strong morpheme), it seems reasonable to posit that there is no movement operation of pa to a higher position as well. However, given the similar syntactic behavior observed between pa in Mar/Mau/Hai and ne in French as seen above, we can wonder whether, like ne, pa is also the head of NegP (31a) or whether it lies in another position, either spec-NegP, like pas or spec of another projection (31b).

As shown in the trees below for French pas/ne and Creole pa:

7 DS and SS levels stand for Deep Structure and Surface Structure which are syntactic representations within the government and binding theory represented as the T-model. (Chomsky 1981) 8 In this study, we will be using the X-bar theory as well as the system of projections and movement as presented in the Government and binding theory. 9 According to Pollock (1989), this projection dominates NegP

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(31a) (31b)

*pa/ne (pa)/pas

(pa) pa/ne

We saw that the negative force of pa and ne does not cancel the negative force of the quantifiers pèsonn/personne, ayen/rien which leads the sentence to yield an NC reading only. We also saw that more than one of these negative quantifiers, which can express sentential negation by themselves, can occur in the same clause with “a single instance of sentence negation” in the three FBCs studied (DeGraff, 1993 : 71). Thus, because pa and ne have a lot of common syntactic properties, it is likely that they also share the same projection position. However, because this sole observation may look theoretically weak,

DeGraff (1993) attempts to give a different analysis and points out that some have posited that pa is generated in Spec-NegP (Lefebvre and Lumsden 1992). However, according to

Zanuttini (1991) and the Neg criterion, presented in (32), the agreement between a negative marker and negative quantifiers is realized by way of a Spec-head relationship10, with the negative marker (or its trace) in head position and the negative quantifier in specifier position sharing the same negative values in NegP.

10 The ne-trace in head-NegP allows for the spec-head relation with pas, as presented by Déprez (2000) and Zanuttini (1991).

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(32)

Thus, if pa was indeed in the specifier position of NegP, it would prevent the negative quantifiers from occurring at this position at SS, and “negative concord in these sentences would remain unexplained (assuming Zanuttini’s framework […])” (DeGraff, 1993 : 72) since no Spec-head relation could be established between pa and the negative quantifiers.

Thus, it seems that the only possible analysis is to consider pa in head NegP. Similarly,

Syea (2013) posits that pa in Mau must be the head-NegP and proposes an additional test to give more weight to his claim.

The test Syea proposes is the “why not?” test11 (Merchant 2001, 2006). If a language allows a structure such as “why not?” then the negative marker (here not) is said to be a specifier, whereas if a language does not allow such a structure the negative marker is said to be a head.

(33) a) Pourquoi pas ? (French) b) *Pourquoi ne ? c) ??Pourquoi non ? d) *Poutchi pa ? (Mar/Hai) e) * ki-fer pa ? (Mau) “why not?” According to this test, pas would be a specifier as “pourquoi pas?” is grammatical and ne would be a head since “pourquoi ne?” is ungrammatical. Concurrently, pa in Mau, Hai and Mar would also be a head since the three Creoles do not allow sentences like (33d-e).

11 Merchant (2006) explains that this test, while applicable to various languages, and especially the ones we are interested in, cannot be applied universally since there are many languages where the words for ‘not’ and ‘no’ are homophonous (i.e Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, etc.) , which would render the test unrevealing, and there are languages that may lack a word for ‘no’ and have head/clitic negation, and thus they would not be expected to have an equivalent to “why not?” (i.e Irish, Mandarin, and Cantonese Chinese) (p.20)

Ludovic Mompelat

Thus, by taking into account the NC readings presented previously in the three

Creoles and with the “why not?” test, we showed that the syntactic behavior of the negative markers pa in Hai and Mau are similar to the syntactic behavior of ne in French, that the behavior of pa in Mar is similar to pa in Hai and Mau. We can thus posit that the negative marker pa in Mar, Mau and Hai is in Neg0 like ne as shown in (31a) and that while Creole pa is syntactically similar to French ne it seems semantically similar to French pas (i.e able to carry its own negative force).

3.4 Creole n-words versus French n-words

We will now observe the behavior of pèsonn and ayen in preverbal or postverbal positions.

DeGraff (1993), Déprez (1999, 2000) and Syea (2013) give different accounts for these specific items, respectively in Hai, French, and Mau. As we saw in the previous section,

DeGraff (1993) treated the possibility that pa may be in a position adjoined to VP in order to find alternatives to his claim that pa heads NegP. He concluded that considering pa in adjoined position would be inconclusive given that “adjunction, obviously, does not lend itself to a typical configuration of Spec-head agreement” (p.75) and that this configuration is necessary for negative concord, thus excluding the possibility for pa being adjoined to

VP. DeGraff thus argues that the only way the VP-adjoined pa hypothesis could stand is if pèsonn and anyen in Hai were to be considered negative polarity items rather than negative quantifiers, as suggested by Déprez (1992). Indeed, if these lexical items were to be NPIs in Creole, there would be no need for them to “move, at LF [(logical form)], into Spec of

NegP”, thus not requiring Spec-head agreement and thus allowing a treatment of pa as not being in head-NegP (DeGraff, 1993 : 75).

Ludovic Mompelat

Following his claim that pa is in Neg0 and that pèsonn and anyen in Hai were negative quantifiers, DeGraff’s account of these items allowed some light to shed on important differences between these items in Hai and in Mau as presented by Syea (2013).

DeGraff proposes two tests to determine the nature of pèsonn and anyen in Hai, the first one being modification of n-words by an adverb such as preske, “almost” in Hai. According to DeGraff, modification with almost is “ruled out in the case of negative polarity items such as English anything” (DeGraff, 1993 : 77).

(34) a) Prèske pèsonn pa vote pou Manigat. (Hai) almost nobody PA vote for Manigat Presque personne n’a voté pour Manigat. (French) ‘Almost nobody voted for Manigat.’ b) Mwen pa manje prèske anyen jodi-a. (Hai) I PA eat almost nothing today Je n’ai presque rien mangé aujourd’hui (French) ‘I have eaten almost nothing today.’ *? I haven’t eaten almost anything today.

We see that in (34) Hai pèsonn and anyen can be modified by prèske in both preverbal and postverbal position thus presumably making them negative quantifiers. Concurrently, Syea

(2013) shows that n-words in Mau can also be modified by preske in preverbal and postverbal positions as in (35) (Syea 2013:160):

(35) a) Li pa finn manz preske naryen. (Mau) he PA ASP eat almost nothing ‘He hasn’t eaten almost anything’ b) Preske personn pa manz. (Mau) almost nobody PA eat ‘Almost nobody has eaten’

Looking at Mar, we notice that pèsonn and ayen can be modified by pres in the preverbal position as seen in (36):

Ludovic Mompelat

(36) a) Pres pèsonn pa té vini. (Mar) Almost nobody PA TNS come ‘Almost nobody came.’ b) Pres ayen pa té vini. (Mar) Almost nothing PA TNS come ‘Almost nothing came.’

In preverbal position, Mar pèsonn and ayen thus show the same distribution as the negative quantifiers in French, English, Mau and Hai. However, in postverbal position, we note that the modification of Mar pèsonn and ayen by près is considered unacceptable or barely acceptable by native speakers as shown in (37):

(37) a) Mwen (près) pa manjé (*?près) ayen. (Mar) I almost PA eat (*?almost) nothing ‘I haven’t eaten almost anything.’ b) Zan ka di ke Marie (près) pa ka fè (*?près) ayen bonmanten. John ASP say that Mary almost pa ASP do (*?almost) nothing morning ‘John says that Mary doesn’t do almost anything in the morning.’

It seems that Près must appear preverbally and modify the whole VP rather than the n- words, whether in the main clause (37a) or in an embedded clause (37b). This distribution correlates with the one in the translation in English for (34b).

Thus, it seems that, in preverbal position, pèsonn and ayen in Mar behave in a way similar to the n-words in Hai, Mau, French. However, in postverbal position, Mar pèsonn and ayen seem to show a distribution closer to NPIs in English. Since the modification by almost/près is a property of universal quantifiers, we can posit that in Mar n-words act as negative quantifiers in preverbal contexts, and NPIs in postverbal contexts.

The second test DeGraff presents involves the property of NPIs like anything and anybody which forbids them from conveying a negative meaning while occurring in

Ludovic Mompelat isolation (38a). Thus, if n-words can occur in isolation and yield a negative meaning, then they must be negative quantifiers since NPIs are not inherently negative and only take a negative reading in the scope of negation (38c-d) (cf. Review of the literature: Negative polarity items, p.2):

(38) a) Q: Who did you see ? A: #Anybody. b) Nobody saw me. c) *Anybody saw me. d) *Anybody didn’t see me.

We see that, in Mau, Hai, Mar, and French, personn/pèsonn/personne and naryen/anyen/ ayen/rien can occur in isolation and do indeed convey a negative meaning, as shown in

(39-40):

(39) a) Q: Kimoun ki wè ou ? A: Pèsonn. (Hai) b) Q: Ki moun ki wè ’w ? A: Pèsonn. (Mar) who ki see 2SG ? Nobody c) Q: Qui t’ a vu ? A: Personne. (French) Who you has seen ? Nobody ‘Who saw you ? – Nobody/*Anybody.’ (40) a) Q: Kisa ou manje ? A: Anyen. (Hai) b) Q: Kisa ou manjé ? A: Ayen. (Mar) What 2SG eat ? A: Nothing c) Q: Qu’ as-tu mangé ? A: Rien. (French) What has-you eaten ? Nothing ‘What did you eat ? – Nothing/*Anything’

The tests presented seem to coincide with the analyses proposed by DeGraff (1993), Syea

(2013) and Déprez (2000), characterizing person/pèsonn/pèsonn and aryen/anyen/anyen as negative quantifiers. However, Déprez (2000) points out an interesting distinction between personne/rien in French and pèsonn/anyen in Hai. She argues that n-words are quantifiers in French but non-quantificational indefinites in Hai (Déprez, 2000 : 270). I investigate these arguments in the next section.

Ludovic Mompelat

3.5 Creole non-quantificational indefinites vs French negative quantifiers

Negative quantifiers are subject to the Neg-Criterion (see definition in 32), undergo quantifier raising rule at LF (May 1989), and can form a pair-quantifier with other quantifiers of the same nature. According to Déprez (2000), the common characteristics that n-words in French and in Hai share coincide with the observations made so far, namely their modification by almost as well as their occurrence in isolation with a negative meaning. However, according to Déprez, n-words in Hai and in French show different properties in terms of locality and quantificational force. French n-words are numeral indefinites with a quantificational force, thus raising to the head of DP due to their determiner-like meaning, as shown below in (42a) proposed in Déprez (1997). This also means that the relation between these n-words and the negative operator must be local since

Quantifier Raising is a local process. According to Déprez (2000), Hai n-words are indefinites, which resemble bare plural nominals, without quantificational force, thus unable to raise to D0 but able to raise to specifier of the null determiner head (42b):

(42)

The configuration in (42b) allows the null D0 to be syntactically licensed by way of Spec-

Head agreement, thus fulfilling the identification condition of bare nominals in Hai no matter their position in a sentence. Moreover, this configuration does not suppress the null-

D0 after NP movement to spec-DP, thus the need for an n-word to co-occur with a negative

Ludovic Mompelat operator still stands. However, given that the DP is licensed internally because of NP- movement to spec-DP, the need to be locally licensed by negation, to fulfill the identification condition, does not stand anymore. Thus, the relation between the non- quantificational n-words and pa in Hai can be non-local as shown in (43):

(43) a) *Tu n’ as dit que Jean a promis d’ inviter personne. you (NE) have said that John has promised to invite nobody. b) M pa kwe Mari di Jan pale ak pèsonn. (Hai) I PA believe Mary say John speak with nobody. ‘I don’t believe that Mary said that John spoke to anyone.’

While clause-boundedness is necessary in French, it is not in Hai. Now looking at Mar, we notice a behavior similar to the one observed in Hai (43b) :

(44) Mwen pa kwé Mari di Zan palé épi pèsonn. (Mar) 1SG PA believe Mary say John speak with nobody ‘I don’t believe that Mary said that John spoke with anyone’

Déprez’s configuration in (42b) seems to predict the behavior of n-words in Mar as seen in

(44). However, unlike Hai and Mar n-words, Syea (2013) indicates that Mau n-words display clause-boundedness, meaning that n-words and negation cannot be unbounded and must be in a strictly local relationship, just like in French, as shown in (45):

(45) a) *Tu n’ as dit que Jean a promis d’ inviter personne. You (NE) have said that John has promised to invite nobody. b) *to pa finn dir ki Zan ti promet invit personn. You PA ASP say that John TNS promise invite nobody

Ludovic Mompelat

While this configuration is acceptable in Hai and Mar, the sentences in French and Mau are ill-formed if negation and n-words are in a non-local relationship. Thus, we can posit that n-words in Mar are more likely to be non-quantificational indefinites, like in Hai, rather than quantifiers like in French and Mau. These observations are presented in Table 1:

Properties of N-words and Negative Concord in French and Mau/Haitian/Martinican Mauritian Haitian Martinican Properties Standard French Creole Creole Creole Negative value Yes Yes Yes Yes Modification by Yes in preverbal Yes in Yes in Yes in Presque/preske/pres Yes in postverbal preverbal preverbal preverbal Yes in Yes in No in postverbal postverbal postverbal DN reading Yes but No No No (neg marker + n- only if word) pragmatically motivated DN reading Yes but No No No (n-word + n-word) marginal reading NC reading No Yes Yes Yes (Neg marker + n- word) NC reading Yes Yes Yes Yes (n-word + n-word) Locality Yes Yes No No Table 1. [Properties of N-words and Negative Concord in French and Mauritian/Haitian/Martinican Creoles]

Thus, we have shown that n-words in the three FBCs we investigated show more common characteristics with one another than with French n-words. Indeed, in the three Creoles, n- words always yield an NC reading when they co-occur and they also must be linked to a negative operator. However, among the three FBCs, Mau n-words share the locality property of French n-words, whereas Hai and Mar n-words do not. This observation leads to a treatment of n-words in Hai and Mar as being non-quantificational indefinites whereas, in Mau, n-words would be considered quantifiers. Finally, through the almost test, we find that in the preverbal position, n-words in Mar behave like n-words in Hai and Mau, but that

Ludovic Mompelat in the postverbal position they cannot be modified by près, the latter modifying the whole

VP instead, thus giving more weight to an analysis which treats them as NPIs.

4. Conclusion

Through the study of sentential negation in French, and Haitian and Mauritian Creoles, this study allowed us to give an outline of the properties of pa and n-words in Martinican Creole as well as the principle of locality at play in the syntax of negation. We first observed that the negative marker pa in Martinican Creole behaves in a way similar, though not identical, to the negative marker pa in both Haitian and Mauritian Creoles. Concurrently, the negative marker pa in these Creole languages seems to share properties of both ne and pas in French, with a prevalence of features shared with ne. Thus, the cognates pa and pas though lexically similar, do not yield the same syntactical behaviors. We then looked at n-words such as nothing and nobody in the three Creoles compared with their respective cognates in French and observed differences in behavior between, a) French and the three Creoles, b) between

Haitian/Martinican Creoles and Mauritian Creole, c) between Martinican Creole and

Haitian/Mauritian Creoles. We found that French n-words are negative quantifiers which are incompatible with the negative operator pas, whereas n-words in French-based Creoles can and must co-occur with the negative operator pa. Mauritian Creole n-words share the locality constraints of French n-words whereas n-words in Haitian and Martinican Creoles do not. Finally, Martinican Creole n-words cannot be modified by pres ‘almost’ in a postverbal position, whereas n-words in French and Haitian/Mauritian Creoles can.

This study, using novel data from Martinican Creole, outlined the similarities and differences between sentential negation in French and three French-based Creoles. It was a first look at the treatment of sentential negation in Martinican Creole using a generativist

Ludovic Mompelat analysis. Our findings and analysis will allow us to dig deeper into the expression of negation in Martinican Creole by looking at other syntactic environments in which the elements presented in this study interact, namely with regards to expletive constructions, copula constructions and modals, and observe how they may behave differently from one

Creole language to another.

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