The semantics behind the reanalysis of French articles 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’. The present 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 which resembles the functioning of noun classes in other languages, where the agglutinated article works as a classifier. It is argued that most French nouns reanalysed 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.