Multifunctionality and Variation Among Grammars: The Case of the Determiner in Haitian and in Fongbe

A multifunctional item is a lexical item that has more than one function. This paper argues that the determiner of Haitian and Fongbe is a multifunctional head. It can appear as the head of several functional category projections, namely, DP, MoodP, TP, and AspP. Given the Projection Principle, how can a single functional item appear as the head of different functional category projections? My account of the multifunctional character of such functional items is twofold. First, multifunctional heads lack categorial features. Second, the category of the projection of a multifunctional head is determined by its complements. It is expected that a multifunctional item will be the object of variation among speakers. The data analyzed in this paper are drawn from a sample of speakers of both languages. Two clear patterns emerge which I will refer to as grammar 1 (which includes speakers of both Haitian and Fongbe) and grammar 2 (which also includes speakers of both Haitian and Fongbe). The striking fact about these data is that the same cluster of properties distinguish grammar 1 from grammar 2 in both Haitian and Fongbe.