The semantics behind the French article-agglutinated nouns in French-based Creoles

Most French-based Creoles have a number of nouns that have originated from the reanalysis of the French noun phrase [article + noun] into a new monomorphemic lexeme, where the former article is agglutinated to the noun; for instance French la plage > Haitian Creole laplaj ‘beach’ ; Fr. de l’eau > Seychelles Creole dilo ‘water’. The existing research on the topic has dealt mainly with the phonological and morphological aspects of the reanalysis during acquisition, but the lexical-semantic side is still under-researched, at present only mentioned in the debate about the substratic hypothesis and in Zribi-Hertz (2014)’s work. This paper proposes to link the agglutination of the article in creoles to nouns that exhibit a low prototypical profile and claims that their meaning matches peculiar semantic types according to a criterion that resembles the functioning of noun classes in other languages, where the agglutinated article works as a classifier. Based on the notion of prototypicality of a noun (Hengeveld 1992), it is argued that most French nouns reanalyzed as agglutinated in creoles are associated with a semantic profile to which natural languages allow reference on a different conceptual basis than that required for an object (Carlson 1977), and this triggers a morphological marking (alternation) when the context entails reference to an object. Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Ocean French-based creoles data are taken into account, collected from existing lexical sources (dictionaries and lexicons) and descriptive literature; in addition, a corpus for minority languages, the An Crúbádan corpus, is consulted for Seychelles Creole, Reunion Creole and Haitian Creole in order to provide information about numbers and distribution of the article agglutination.