Whamit!

Speaker: Christopher Legerme

Title: Transitive alternations and the syntax-phonology interface of Haitian Creole and Mauritian Creole

 

Abstract: The verbal morphology of French Creoles is systematically sensitive to transitive argument alternations; the LONG FORM of transitive verbs is generally required when their internal argument surfaces as a preverbal subject (Henri 2020, forthcoming).

 

  Fim         ??( ki )      te         gad*( e )      sou   Netflix

  Movie      that          PST     watch           on     Netflix

  “Movies (that) were watched on Netflix.”  (Haitian Creole)

 

  Li          pe            fors*( e )   vann     so          lakaz 

  3.SG     PROG     force          sell       3.SG      house 

  “He is being forced to sell his home.” (Mauritian Creole, Kriegel 1994)

 

It just so happens that the syntactic facilitation needed to support preverbal transitive OV word orders in the first place varies by language and by verb (see Newman 2020 for facilitation effects on A-movement; see Syea 2024 for “transitive OV” in creoles). For example,  Tense/Aspect morphemes suffice for Mauritian Creole (MC), but Haitian Creole (HC) speakers strongly prefer that the overt subject complementizer accompany their preverbal arguments in this context. Still, the morphological requirement is consistent for both languages, and the short form of the verb (e.g., gad or fors) is ruled out here. This consistency is interesting because of how differently that the alternation between long and short verb forms plays out between the two languages. The long and short forms are regularly in complementary distribution in MC, while they are mostly interchangeable in HC. For both languages, however, we know that the short form can’t be VP-final (Syea 1992). There’s some consensus that the short/long alternation reflects deeper facts about syntactic constituency (van der Wal 2017; van der Wal & Veenstra 2015). In this regard French Creoles are likened to Bantu languages such as Zulu where the analogous conjoint and disjoint alternation may also be “constituency-based”, and the morphologically sparser conjoint forms likewise may not be VP-final (e.g., Halpert 2016: 87–89; cf. van der Wal & Veenstra 2015: 120). It’s also interesting that HC only has about 12 verbs that alternate between long and short forms, while about 70% of Mauritian verbs alternate like this (Henri, forthcoming), and yet both languages constrain their verbal morphology in similar ways. 

 

Please join me for this Syntax Square as I present ongoing work on argument structure in French Creoles, focusing on constructions that have been analyzed as passives or middles and their interaction with alternating verb forms. I will argue that, rather than treating “passives” and  “middles” as germane to how we categorize the verbs within these languages, it is more efficient (and much less confusing) to examine how general principles of both locality-constrained syntactic derivation (e.g., Newman 2021, 2024) and phonologically governed morphological realization (e.g., Scheer 2016; Lahrouchi and Ulfsbjorninn 2024) can interact to shape the complex surface patterns. The comparison of these grammars therefore promises insight into how verbs are constructed when morphological paradigms are compact but tightly regulated by the  syntax-phonology interface, revealing deeper structural commonalities despite superficial differences.