Le syntagme nominal en créole haïtien : aspects morpho-phonologiques et syntaxiques

Abstract

The determinative phrase in Haitian Creole (HC) has been studied in many works, particularly from the morphosyntactic viewpoint, and we know that the functioning of the definite determinant (DEF) presents an allomorphism which depends on the phonemic nature of the final phoneme (sometimes the penultimate one) of the last word preceding the allomorph in question. Thus, from the underlying form "la", the different possible endings of the word immediately preceding the DEF, the Creole speakers generate allomorphs "a", "an", "nan", "lan". To each of these allomorphs there corresponds only one morpheme which marks the plurality: "yo" which is, in reality, the morpheme of the plural rather than the "definitude". We also take into account the possessive and demonstrative determinants, and the indefinite article (INDEF). We find it necessary to consider the study of these types of determinants from a morpho-phonological point of view. The originality of our approach is that it takes into account a diatopic dimension we hardly find in other works. Thus, in the south there is a nasalized [ĩ] with an INDEF value which is absent from the other varieties of HC. For the demonstrative, we notice some morphophonological differences between the northern variety and the one of the rest of the linguistic community. About the possessive, the « functive a » of the northern variety is the main element that makes the difference particularly from the morphophonological and syntactic viewpoint, in its co-articulation relation with the other elements of its cotext in the phrase.