Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Online First

Contact between French and Martinican Creole (MC) takes place in a society where bilingualism is the standard, in a situation of constant language mixing. French and MC, although related, show significant typological divergences on some specific features, e.g. the order between noun and definite determiner in the noun phrase, or the use of a linker to mark a possessive embedded noun phrase. In this paper, I explore the possible combination of the different values of these features in mixed noun phrases occurring in corpora. I inquire about the possible parameters which may influence the outcome and explain the relative frequencies of these different combinations. It appears that there is a partially common pool of elementary structures. Many utterances fall into the category termed by Muysken (2000) ‘congruent lexicalization’. I also observe that apparent complex double embeddings have an internal logic, as they result from adjunction of multi-word modifiers. Finally I propose a model which accounts for the observed occurrences by postulating a level in the speech generation process where language itself is underspecified, and where it is in a position to be specified on the fly by contextual factors, coming either from the lexicon or from the constructional frame.