Bare Nouns Among and Beyond Creoles. a Syntactic-Semantic Study
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Bare Nouns among and beyond Creoles. A syntactic-semantic study of Kriyol Bare Noun Phrases based on a crosslinguistic comparison and the theoretical implications. Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Dr. phil. im Fach Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft von Chiara Truppi Präsident der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin Prof. Dr. Jan-Hendrik Olbertz Dekanin der Philosophischen Fakultät II Prof. Dr. Helga Schwalm Gutachter: 1. Prof. Dr. Manfred Krifka - HU Berlin 2. Prof. Dr. Alain Kihm - CNRS Paris eingereicht am 09.05.2014 verteidigt am 26.09.2014 Acknowledgement First of all, I would like to thank my advisor, Manfred Krifka, who has provided guidance and expertise; moreover, without his trust in my research project, I would not have had the possibility of a doctoral experience at the HU. Big thanks to Tonjes Veenstra for his support and his helpful suggestions during my years as a PhD student. I also want to thank Alain Kihm, Tjerk Hagemeijer, Elisabeth Verhoeven and Elena Gorishneva for having agreed to be part of the committee. The Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is a stimulating place to conduct research in semantics and syntax. I am grateful to the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes for the ideological and financial support given to me from August 2011 to July 2014. Thanks to Ines Duarte, Tjerk Hagemeijer, Nélia Alexandre and Fernanda Pratas for offering me the possibility of being a guest PhD student at the CLUL of the Universidade de Lisboa. I also want to thank my friends and colleagues from the CLUL for their exchange and support: Eunice Fernandes, Paula Luegi, Patricia Nunes Gonçalves, João Silva, Francisco Costa, João Rodrigues, Celeste Rodrigues, Cacao (Maria do Carmo), Haldane Amaro and Abigail Cosme. Big thanks to John Holm for his support and interest in my work. A special thanks to my colleagues from the GDRI – Seepicla research group on pidgin and creole languages for their precious feedback in our meetings in Berlin (June 2013) and in London (June 2014) and, in particular, to Viviane Depréz for her feedback and interest in my research. Thanks also to the audience of ACBLPE and SPCL Joint Meeting (June 2013, Lisbon) and FACS-4 (November 2014, Paris) for the precious feedback. I also want to thank Susann Fischer and the scientific staff of the Department for Romance Linguistics of Hamburg University for having given me the possibility of presenting my research project at their doctoral colloquium, and for their feedback and interest in my work. A special thanks to the research fellows of the ZAS Berlin for allowing me to present my research project in their DocSkills doctoral colloquium and for their precious feedback. Among the colleagues that I want to thank for support there are Nuno Soares for his help and feedback on bare nouns in European Portuguese, and Michael Dürr, Katharina Böhnert, Mia Batinic, Antonio Civardi, Marta Ghilardi, Shrita Hassamal, Maria Mazzoli, Feresteh Modarresi, Daniela Moncalvo, Kilu von Prinze, Katja Reetz, Cristina Villari, and Slawomir Wacewicz. A very big thanks to my informants and friends in Lisbon, Berlin and Rome for their crucial help. Many of them allowed me to interview them, others were always ready to help me with any question relative to Kriyol and Guinea-Bissau: Mamadú Saibana Baldé, Michel Té, Intunda Na Montche, Armenio Mendes, Karina Silva Gomez, Jorge Sanca and the family Djalo, Candinha Pinto Maria, Elson Cabral, Edson Incopté, Francisco Mango, Junilto Alvarenga Ntchemó, Gerónimo Costa, Candinha Maria Pinto, Duka, Zuzu, Cambraima Alanso Cassama, Florinda Justino Silva, Ramatulai Djaló and Rashid Djaló. I apologize if anyone is missing. A special thanks to my friends and collegues of Nô lanta djunto e.V., in particular to Pondingo Saliha von Medem and Leoni Sanca for their support. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to Claudio and Carmen, Paolo and Roberta, and the rest of my family, and to my great friends Chiara Giuliante, Cristina Pareschi, Andrea Locatelli, Andrea Piccoli, Renzo Palazzetti, Antje Glaner, Liila Taruffi, Sven Stocks, Roberta Pozone, Silvia Balassone, Sonia Bergamo, Ana Senčic, Charlene Neubert, Esther Doumbouya, and all the friends who have supported my interest and passion in linguistics. Thanks to Ezra Plessing for his support during the last steps of this experience. Also thanks to Adam Jaffee for reviewing my dissertation. I apologize for anyone whom I did not mention here. Abstract The nature of the present dissertation is threefold: i) descriptive, ii) comparative, and iii) theoretical. After a brief general discussion on the history and grammar of Guinea-Bissau Creole, and after an extensive review of various approaches on BNPs, both from the semantic and syntactic perspective, the present work will offer an exhaustive description of the distribution and interpretation of Bare Noun Phrases in GBC. They may be found in both argument and nonargument positions. The general tendency for BNPs in GBC is to yield a definite reading (subjects, recipient objects, in topicalizion, dislocation and clefting). One difference is that bare patient objects may yield any possible interpretation, except from the specific plural. BNPs interpretation is driven by contextual factors as well as by aspect and predicate type. Perfective and continuous imperfective contexts trigger definite specific readings for bare objects. One difference is that bare objects in habitual imperfective contexts yield indefinite nonspecific interpretations. As for predicate types, bare subjects of stage-level predicates yield existential readings, whereas bare subjects of individual-level predicates derive definite generic readings. The present work also undertakes a crosslinguistic comparison between creoles and noncreoles: i) Cape Verdean Creole, Santome, Papiamento and Brazilian Portuguese; and ii) Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese and Gbe languages. It turns out that BNPs distribution and interpretation are quite homogeneous. Importantly, BNPs in any of these languages may yield both singular and plural readings: BNPs are thus unspecified as for Number. This leads us to our theoretical discussion on Number: starting from Depréz’s (2007) Plural Parameter and its basic assumptions (e.g. BNPs are unspecified as for Number, and the basic denotation of nouns is kind of type e), a new model, and the consequent linguistic typology, is developed. Contents List of abbreviations ..........................................................................................................x Chapter 1 .......................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Goals of the dissertation........................................................................................... 1 1.2 Methodology ........................................................................................................... 3 1.3 Outline of the dissertation ....................................................................................... 3 Chapter 2 .......................................................................................................................... 5 A Sketch of Kriyol: Historical, social and linguistic aspects ................................................. 5 2.1 Lusofonia ................................................................................................................ 5 2.2 The rising of a new typology of languages: The creoles ............................................. 6 2.2.1 Theories of creolization ................................................................................................................................... 9 2.3 The emergence of the Creole language of Guinea-Bissau ........................................ 13 2.3.1 Kriyol in more recent times ......................................................................................................................... 15 2.3.2 Kriyol´s substratum ........................................................................................................................................ 18 2.4 Kriyol grammar ..................................................................................................... 23 2.4.1 The morphosyntax of Kriyol ....................................................................................................................... 24 2.4.2 The nominal domain ...................................................................................................................................... 28 2.4.3 The verbal domain .......................................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................ 36 Theoretical background .................................................................................................. 36 iv 3.1 Definiteness ......................................................................................................... 36 3.1.1 Approaches to definiteness ......................................................................................................................... 38 3.2 Genericity ............................................................................................................. 41 3.2.1 Generic sentences ..........................................................................................................................................