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A note on clitic doubling in African and Creole languages1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Dudley K. Nylander
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Extract

In this paper, I Would like to present a tentative analysis of cliti doubling in some African and creole languages. Consider, first, the case of Yoruba. Whenever a subject is cleft in Yoruba, a resumptive pronoun must be inserte in the position originally occupied by the cleft element. Clefting the subject of 3(a)yields 3 (b)or3(c).

Type
Notes And Communications
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 1987 , pp. 120 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1987

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References

2 Osvaldo Jaeggli Topics in Romance syntax, Foris, Dordrecht, 1982. See also Hagit Borer parametric syntax, Dordrecht, 1984.Google Scholar

3 On semantic (thematic) roles, see Ray Jackendoff Semantic interpretation ingenerative grammar, Mass, 1972.Google Scholar

4 A Particularity of the data to be examined is that each example of clitic doubling also involves some form of WH-movement (e.g. clefting). See Noam Chomsky ‘On WH-movement’, in Culicover, P.W, Wasow, T., and Akmajian, A.. Formal syntax. Academic press, New york, 1977.Google Scholar

5 The examples in 3, 4 and 5 are based on Rowlans, E.C.Teach yourself yoruba, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1969.Google Scholar

6 The verbs gbé and wá form what is called a serial verb construction. See Awobuluyi, A.O. Studies in the syntax of the standard Yoruba verb, doctoral thesis, Columbia University (New York), 1967.Google Scholar

7 The clefting particle in Yoruba is /ni/./ni/becomes /I/ before any vowel other than/i/. On this point, see Rowlands (op. cit) and Badejo, B.R. ‘La topicalisation en Yoruba’, in Kaye, J.Current approaches to Afrian linguistics, II, Dordrechi, 1983, 242,Google Scholar

8 Welmers, William E.African language structures Berkeley 1973, 313.Google Scholar

9 Grenoble, DenisEklo, A. ‘Le système verbal du kposso’, unpublished paper, Université de Grenoble-III, 1983. I say ‘seems to be identical’ because Creissels and Eklo point out that Kposso has ‘un unique pronoun de troisième personne, qui est valable quelle que soit la nature du nom repris ou sons-entendu’, but do not say explicity that it is the singulr form that is used.Google Scholar

10 The Papiamentu data are from pieter Mysken‘Preposition stranding and trace spell-out in papiamentu’, handout of paper read at the annual conference on African linguistics, University of Leiden, 1983.Google Scholar

11 Koopman, Hilda ‘Les constructions relatives’ in Lefebvre, C., Magloire-Holly, H. and Piou, N. (ed.) Syntaxe de Phaіtien, Ann Arbor 1982, 177–8.Google Scholar

12 See Jean-Pierre Paillet and André Dugas Approaches to syntax, Amsterdam, 1982.

13 Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, 1966.

14 For a detailed exposition of the framework in question, see Noam Comsky Lectures on government and binding, Dordrecht, 1981.

15 An argument is a referential element, e.g.John, the book, my neighbour, A non-argument is a non-referential element, e.g. expletive it (cf. ‘it is raining’) and existential there (cf.‘There are three men in the room’).

16 Kyne, Richard S.’Chains, categories external to S and French complex inversion’. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, I, 1983, 128. The examples were originally cited by Yves-Charles Morin in his unpublished paper ‘There is no inversion of subject clitics in modern French’ (Université de Montreal, 1979).Google Scholar