The Cape Verdean
NP in the Sotavento Varieties:
An Empirical
Study
(University of
Georgia)
This paper is divided into two main sections covering the Cape Verdean full noun phrase and adjectival predicates. The ambition of this talk is to describe the functioning of NPs in a Romance Creole such as CVC and contribute to the debate on the theories of creolization by focusing on morphological properties and agreement in CVC.
The study of the full noun phrase involves
the semantics of indefinite and definite determiners, the interpretive
variability of null determiners, pluralization strategies, and gender
marking. The last topic addresses
adjectives and agreement.
Most of the speech data in this paper are
drawn from the corpus compiled in the course of three fiedtrips conducted in
1997, 2000 and 2001. The selected
examples represent speech samples from all four Sotavento islands.
Key words: Cape Verdean Creole; Noun phrase; Determiners; Agreement;
Interpretive variability.