Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)
Title: Movement Dependencies and Existential HAVE constructions in Haitian Creole
Time: Tuesday, February 27th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: For this upcoming Syntax Square, I will be presenting content from two papers which are relevant for an unresolved puzzle of Haitian Creole syntax: 1. Takahashi and Gracanin-Yuksek’s (2008) Morphosyntax of Movement Dependencies in Haitian Creole and 2. Myler’s (2018) Complex copula systems as suppletive allomorphy. Here’s the puzzle. The Haitian Creole (HC) sentence kimoun ki te genyen is ambiguous.
1. (a) Ki moun *(ki) te genyen?
WH person COMP PST win.
“Who won?” (lit. Which person that won?)
(b) Ki moun *(ki) te genyen?
WH person COMP PST have
“Who was there?” (lit. Which person that had?)
The surfacing of the complementizer ki after a wh-moved phrase is claimed to be symptomatic of subject extraction (Koopman 1982, DeGraff 2001, Takahashi and Gracanin-Yuksek 2008). Therefore, it’s puzzling that ki obligatorily surfaces in (1b) given how the suppletive allomorphy approach (Myler 2018) deals with the syntax of existential “copula” constructions like the following:
2. (a) Te genyen yon moun
PST have a person
“There was a person.” (lit. had a person)
(b) Yon moun *(ki) sanble (ki/∅/*ke) te genyen
INDF person COMP seem COMP PST have
“There seemed to be a person.” (lit. A person that seems that had)
Note that in (2b), the second ki is optional. To my knowledge, these facts of HC are unexplained in the literature. Related facts are the obligatory presence of ki with moved thematic arguments of certain (transitive?) verbs like jwe “play” or anbrase “hug”.
3. (a) (Se) gita ki t ap jwe nan pak la
it.is guitar COMP PST PROG play in park the
“GUITAR was playing in the park.” (lit. (It is) GUITAR that was play in the park)
(b) (Se) ti moun yo ki t ap anbrase
It.is small person PL COMP PST PROG hug “THE KIDS were hugging” (lit. (It is) THE KIDS that was hug)
HC apparently doesn’t show subject inversion (DeGraff 1992: 48) nor English-style passive morphology (Deprez 1992: 208). Still some verbs inflect depending on whether its external argument is agentive or thematic, that is, there are verbs in HC that alternate between a transitive and intransitive form (DeGraff 2001: 75).
4. (a) Mwen fè/*fèt kabann lan rapid-rapid maten an
1SG make bed the fast-fast morning the “I made the bed very quickly this morning.” (DeGraff 2001: 75)
5. (b) Kabann lan *fè/fèt rapid-rapid maten an
bed the made fast-fast morning the
“The bed was made very quickly this morning.” (DeGraff 2001: 75)
I do not have a solution to these puzzles, but I will present the analyses of complementizer ki and existential HAVE sentences of Takahashi and Gracanin-Yuksek (2008) and Myler (2018), respectively, to show how exactly a sentence such as (1b) is puzzling given the theories advanced in those papers, and I will speculate that the correct solution could come from how one might handle the null expletive there and complementizer agreement in the language.