This work identifies distributional and interpretative properties of functional morphology in the nominal domain of Jamaican Creole (JC) and, in the spirit of cartographic research (Cinque 2002, Rizzi 2004, Belletti 2004), develops an...
moreThis work identifies distributional and interpretative properties of functional morphology in the nominal domain of Jamaican Creole (JC) and, in the spirit of cartographic research (Cinque 2002, Rizzi 2004, Belletti 2004), develops an analysis for these manifestations of DP in the form of a detailed structural map. The JC data is seen to provide empirical support for a syntactic map composed of several hierarchically organized functional projections, a sequence of projections striking clear parallelisms with the clausal domain and also generally overtly realizing either specifier or head in this language (Chomsky & Lasnik 1977, Koopman 1993, Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Giusti 1998). Finally, building on both (1) the impact of the nominal architecture on telicity and (2) the last resort phenomenon of doubly filling the identified projections with morphological material in both head and specifier positions, we propose an analysis for deriving default past, completive readings in Creole ‘bare sentences’, i.e. those sentences where tense and aspect are null (Dechaine 1991).
