A Contrastive study of sentential negation in Martinican, Haitian and Mauritian creoles, and French The case of pa, pèsonn and ayen
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Abstract
This study seeks to offer a comparative analysis of the syntactic properties of n-words and the negative marker in Martinican creole, using previous research done on Haitian and Mauritian creoles (Syea, 2013; DeGraff 1993). Martinican creole, Haitian creole, and Mauritian creole are French-based creoles in that they represent the variety of creoles whose lexifier language is French. Given that the common lexical and morphological baseline of this variety of creole is French, a comparative study of lexical items—here negative expressions—could shed light on the similarities and differences in their syntactic behaviors, as well as on syntactic differences between a creole language and its lexifier language. Indeed, although creoles inherit their lexical items from a lexifier language, there is no reason to assume that cognate lexical items will display the same syntactic properties. In the current study, we will compare the negative marker pa in the three varieties of creole with the French lexical cognate pas and French negative marker ne in order to give a comprehensive description of this lexical item. We will also observe the syntactic behavior of the negative expressions ayen ‘nothing’ and pèsonn ‘no one’ compared to their French equivalents rien, personne, respectively.
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