Probing the role of bounding, definiteness and other factors: bare noun and determiner use in Guianese French Creole

Abstract

From a cognitive‑semantic perspective, two important conceptual schemas underlie determiner use and the count/mass distinction in languages such as English and French, namely bounding and definiteness. This paper investigates to what extent these concepts are related to noun phrase marking in Guianese French Creole (GFC). The corpus‑based analysis shows that GFC uses bare nouns not only with unbounded entities and in non‑referential and generic contexts, but also for representing singular and plural indefinite and definite referents. At the same time, GFC shows a clear count/mass distinction and also has definite and indefinite determiners. However, in contrast to article languages such as English and French, bounding and definiteness need to be examined alongside semantic‑pragmatic and discourse‑informational criteria in order to explain the use of determiners and bare nouns in GFC. Thus, determiner use as a grammatical individuation strategy clearly has a different weight in GFC, which does not fit into cross‑linguistic typologies of articleless and article languages (e.g. Chierchia 1998). The comparative results on GFC, French and English also serve to evaluate two recent typological claims: while they confirm Le Bruyn et al.’s (2017) hypothesis on a correlation between the richness of the article system and the freedom of bare noun use, Abraham et al.’s (2007) claim of a universally complementary distribution of articles and grammatical aspect distinctions in the verb phrase is not supported by the data.