Third Party Funds Group - Sub project
Acronym: GRK 2839 Project 13
Start date : 01.10.2022
End date : 30.09.2027
Basic typological features of Creole languages include the so-called “multifunctionality” of linguistic items (Lefebvre/Lorange 2015:359). Multifunctionality is generally understood as "the capacity of a linugistic unit to fall within more than one linguistioc class or category" (Véronique 2020:197–198, our translation). For example, Haitian Creole words such as manje or malad are invariable and can be used as predicates in li manje ‘(s)he has eaten’ or mwen malad ‘I’m sore’, but also as subjects or objects in li achete manje li ‘(s)he bought his/her food’, or malad mwen an geri ‘my sore has healed’. Likewise, personal deictic expressions such as mwen ‘1st sg’ or li ‘3rd sg’ can function as a subject, an object, or a possessive marker, and in the case of yo ‘3rd pl’ as a plural marker. These different uses can clearly be distinguished by distributional criteria, but are in each case related to the same semantic core, i.e. eating and soreness (manje, malad), grammatical person and number (mwen, li, yo etc.). In previous research, Haitian Creole word forms that can occur in different syntactic slots have generally been analysed in terms of homonymy. For example, Valdman’s (2007) reference dictionary lists different numbered senses for each of the functions mentioned above, which are assigned to parts of speech such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, and prepositions. However, this treatment of multifunctional items may not only obscure an adequate description of Haitian Creole grammar, but also be an artefact of well-entrenched European grammaticographic traditions, which are not necessarily appropriate for describing languages with other typological features (Broschart 1997:124). Similar observations have been made for English concerning words such as since, before etc. (which are often assigned to the word classes of adverb, conjunction and preposition in dictionaries) or both, this etc. (classified as determiners, pronouns and adverbs) (see e.g. Huddleston & Pullum 2002, Herbst & Schüller 2008). It would thus seem appropriate to develop a model for the word classes in Haitian Creole along the lines of Croft’s (2001) Radical Construction Grammar, in which word class categories are defined on the basis of their occurrence in constructional slots characterized by semantic roles and are seen as construction- and thus language-specific (Croft 2001:106; 2016:383). Word classes can then be regarded as generalizations over usage experiences (Vartiainen 2021:231). Previous studies on English adjectives (Croft 2016, Vartiainen 2021) have shown that the Construction Grammar approach complies only partially with the canonical understanding of parts of speech. What appears to be one word category can often be described as a cluster of constructions that show different frequencies and in which particular items participate to different degrees, so that membership seems to be a matter of degree rather than a categorical property. In addition, the number of word classes to be distinguished varies according to the level of abstraction chosen for the description. Thus, the concept of “word class”, from which “multifunctionality” is implicitly derived, raises a number of questions that are directly relevant to the organization of the constructicon (see also the discussion in Croft 2001:107ff). This makes Haitian Creole a particularly promising candidate to explore the nature of constructions and constructional networks. Against this backdrop, the aim of this project is to identify, systematise and analyse families of constructions in which a selection of Haitian Creole items can occur, and in which they cannot. In order to do this, we rely on a corpus-based approach (cf. also Fitzgerald 2020), using the Corpus of Northern Haitian Creole (Indiana University, Bloomington, ca. 200,000 tokens). A list of “multifunctional” items will be extracted from Valdman’s (2007) dictionary (i.e. items with senses assigned to different word classes). These items will be searched in the corpus based on their surface form (to ensure high recall) and those with at least 50 occurrences will be retained for further analysis. Adressing the GRQs CON1 and CON2, the examples will be analysed and divided into categories, based on common distributional and semantic properties. Items that can be used in similar sets of constructions will be grouped together. On this basis, the following issues relevant to NET2 will be discussed: What are the candidates for constructions that define word classes in Haitian Creole? At which level of abstraction can they be described? How do they relate to each other in terms of polysemy, subpart, metaphorical extension or instance? Can membership be determined in absolute or gradual terms? With how many word-class defining constructions do so-called multifunctional items occur, so that they should be called multifunctional? If this is the case: Can these word class-defining constructions be brought together at a higher level of abstraction? Is the concept of multifunctionality as applied to Haitian and other Creole languages empirically justified under a Construction Grammar framework?