Instructors: E.O. Aboh and M. DeGraff
Thursdays 9:30—12:30, 32-D461
Course description
In this class, we will study various aspects of Gungbe (a Gbe language of the Kwa family) and Haitian Creole. A question that one may want to ask immediately is why these two and not any other combination, say Gungbe versus Mandarin Chinese or Haitian Creole versus Mohawk?
One motivation for focusing on Gungbe and Haitian Creole is historical: Some of the creators of Haitian Creole were native speakers of Gbe languages (Ewe, Fon, Gun, etc.). Accordingly, we can naively think that certain properties of their native languages were transmitted, via “relexification,” into the new language variety—-the “Creole”—-they created in the colonial Caribbean. Yet, while Gbe and Haitian Creole appear to share certain general syntactic properties, close scrutiny reveals that they also display drastic and fascinating contrasts. Therefore comparing Haitian Creole to Gungbe is, in some sense, an exercise in relatively fine-grained comparative syntax where we try to elucidate the principles that govern variation across languages that are historically related and that exhibit a substantial inventory of morphosyntactic parallels.
This exercise is also relevant for understanding variation across certain language types. Gungbe and Haitian creole display certain core properties of isolating languages like Mandarin Chinese (e.g., “bare” noun, serial verb construction). But again, it appears under inspection that the languages differ radically in certain domains (e.g., DP). Therefore, one of the questions we are concerned with in this class is to what extent the similarities between Gungbe and Haitian Creole are due to the structural make-up of isolating languages and how the unraveling of this structural make-up will help understand the commonly assumed typological partition between isolating and non-isolating languages.
Provisional outline:
| Week 1: | Overviews of Gbe and Haitian Creole morpho-syntax |
| Week 2: | A first look at (certain) DPs: “adjectival” modification and related issues |
| Week 3: | More on DPs: relative clauses, factives, etc. |
| Week 4: | Predication, clefts/doubling, etc. |
| Week 5: | Tense, Mood and Aspect, “Inherent-complement” (Light?) Verbs, Serial Verb Constructions |
| Week 6: | (continued) |
| Week 7: | Back to DPs: Number, “bare” nouns specificity, possession, etc. |
| Week 8: | (continued) |
| Week 9: | Locatives |
| Week 10: | Negation |
| Week 11: | (continued) |
| Week 12: | Nominal and clausal determiners, clause-final “particles,” etc. |
| Week 13: | Wrap-up |