Nominal constituents in French lexifier creoles: Probing the structuring role of grammaticalization

The paper offers a comparative study of the syntactic structure of nominal constituents in French Lexifier Creoles (FLC). In spite of the variability observed in the distribution of FLC determiners, the paper argues that FLC have a common functional architecture and presents both conceptual and empirical arguments in support of this view. Order variability, the paper proposes, is the result of extensive phrasal movement inside this common architecture that is triggered by the functional heads of FLC. Whether a given FLC determiner is a functional head or not is taken to reflect grammaticalization processes modeled in the Minimalist framework. A novel approach to grammaticalization and particularly to 'semantic bleaching' is shown to have a structuring effect that accounts for the ordering differences manifest across FLC determiners.