In a number of French-related creoles a distinction is made between long and short forms of verbs. We argue that the alternation is a reflex of French inflectional morphology that has survived the creolization process, showing that the result is a long-short opposition of verb forms, similar to the formal variation in the learner varieties, and therefore ultimately due to learner strategies in the acquisition of French as a second language. We further discuss the potential role of substrate and argue that the alternation started out as a phonological/prosodic phenomenon (as it basically still is in Haitian Creole). We conclude that the alternation (or verb allomorphy) can be seen as a morphological reflex of the Spell-Out domain at the vP-level.
2021. Morphomic structure in Mauritian Kreol: On change, complexity and creolization. Morphology 31:4 ► pp. 447 ff.
Kouwenberg, Silvia & John Victor Singler
2018. Creolization in Context: Historical and Typological Perspectives. Annual Review of Linguistics 4:1 ► pp. 213 ff.
Baptista, Marlyse
2017. Pidgins and Creoles. In Oxford Handbook Topics in Linguistics,
Veenstra, Tonjes & Pieter Muysken
2017. Serial Verb Constructions. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition, ► pp. 1 ff.
van der Wal, Jenneke & Tonjes Veenstra
2015. The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages. Folia Linguistica 49:1
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