Capeverdean Creole: some parametric values

João Costa & Fernanda Pratas

(Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Although an approach of Capeverdean as a Creole (CVC) may bring much light onto diachronic variation phenomena, cross-linguistic data suggest, in the framework of Generative Grammar, that CVC presents parametric values similar to Brazilian Portuguese (BP), Russian, English and perhaps other languages, creoles or non-creoles.

Three of these values are:

A. Pro-drop parameter – like BP (Duarte 1995, a.o.), CVC is a semi-pro-drop language: it has expletive null subjects but no referential null subjects in A-positions.

B. Copula deletion – as in Russian, and also some other creole languages, CVC allows copula deletion in the present tense, mostly in negative contexts.

C. T(ense)P(hrase) parameter – as in English, there is no reason to split inflectional projections (Thráinsson 1994) in CVC. Contrary to previous analyses, we will provide evidence showing that it is legitimate to argue that there is no need for postulating an Agr head. The only required category is TP. In spite of the surface multiplication of auxiliary heads, we will claim that they are best analyzed as instances of recursive head adjunction to the same category. This analysis will permit treating the negative marker ka as an adjunct to T, as proposed for European Portuguese in Matos (1999).

D. V(verb)-movement parameter – as in English, the absence of positional effects and the lack of the relevant morphology suggests there is no motivation to postulate V-T-I movement (Bobaljik 1995). Baptista (1997) defends there is V-movement in CVC and that it would be coherent with ba, a post-verbal TMA marker of past-imperfective (in Haitian Creole, for instance, there is no V-movement, but all TMA markers are pre-verbal – DeGraff 1996). The primary goal of this talk is to propose a different analysis for post-verbal ba, couched within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), according to which some operations occur after syntax. We argue that the main verb stays in situ and that lowering of T, at the morpho-phonological level (Halle & Marantz 1993, Embick & Noyer 2001), affixes ba in a post-verbal position. This analysis is able to accommodate an interesting fact: ba and clitics are in complementary distribution, which follows from adjacency conditions that find no place within syntax proper.

Keywords: Capeverdean; null subject; copula deletion; verb movement parameter.