A new look into relativization in Martinican
Minella Duzerol (DDL)
Relativization, the syntactic process through which a subordinate clause expresses a property attributed to a noun, is not well documented for Martinican, a French-based Creole of the French West Indies island of Martinique. Following a typological perspective, this paper describes the two strategies identified in Martinican: the syntactic gap and the resumptive pronoun. Then, it argues that the morpheme la, occurring at the end of relative clauses that modify semantically definite nouns, is different from the definite determiner la. Lastly, the distribution in discourse of the available strategies is examined, looking at both typological and sociolinguistic parameters.