[Grammaires créoles] Stéphane Térosier (Leiden)

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Stéphane Térosier (Leiden)

Martinican Creole “definite” wh-questions: At the interface between syntax and pragmatics (handout/ exemplier)

In this talk, I discuss a class of Martinican Creole (MC) interrogative sentences which I shall refer to as “definite” wh-questions (DWQs) owing to the presence of a clausal determiner (CD) in sentence-final position. This terminological choice is in part motivated by the morphological identity of the CD with the definite determiner. More importantly, however, much like definite noun phrases, DWQs are subject to the Familiarity Condition (Heim 1982). Thus, they cannot be uttered out of the blue and trigger a hard presupposition (Abusch 2010). I attribute these properties to the CD, which, I suggest, occupies a position in the interactional spine, which regulates the syntax-pragmatics interface (Wiltschko 2021).

Diachronically, I argue that these constructions originate in the contact between French and Kwa languages, which characterized MC genesis. To be more specific, I argue that, initially, MC la developed in the nominal domain as a reanalysis of the French intensifier là. This then set the way for its extension to the sentential domain, as evidenced in DWQs. This lends support to the hypothesis that interfaces are particularly vulnerable in situations of language contact (Sorace 2011, Aboh 2015).