The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages

AbstractMauritian Creole displays an alternation between a short and a long form of the verb, which is reminiscent of the conjoint–disjoint alternation found in some eastern Bantu languages. Based on comparison with other French-based creoles and socio-historical evidence, we conclude that the Bantu substrate must have had an impact on the grammatical system of Mauritian Creole. We compare the synchronic properties of the alternations in Mauritian Creole and the most likely substrate Bantu languages of northern Mozambique and examine two possible scenarios for the influence of Bantu on the Mauritian verbal alternation, concluding that probably only the (syntactic) basics of the Bantu alternation motivated the persistence of the alternation in Mauritian Creole.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from De Gruyter via http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/flin-2015-000

Code-Switching by Phase

We show that the theoretical construct “phase” underlies a number of restrictions on code-switching, in particular those formalized under the Principle of Functional Restriction (González-Vilbazo 2005) and the Phonetic Form Interface Condition (MacSwan and Colina 2014). The fundamental hypothesis that code-switching should be studied using the same tools that we use for monolingual phenomena is reinforced.Federal Ministry of Education and ResearchPeer Reviewe

Pronominalization and variation in Dutch demonstrative and possessive expressions

The goal of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of DP-internal pronominalization patterns in standard Dutch and Dutch dialects. A core ingredient of our analysis will be the idea that the possessive and demonstrative constructions we discuss feature a DP-internal predication relationship. Furthermore, we aim to explain the (dimensions of) variation between dialects. Part of the attested micro-variation will be shown to be reducible to the PF-interface and the lexicon, i.e., the loci where we expect cross-linguistic/dialectal variation to be given the assumptions of the minimalist program (Chomsky 2000, Kayne 2005).We will further argue that some cross-dialectal differences relate to displacement