Michel DeGraff

A riddle on negation in Haitian

As its phoneüc resemblance with French pas suggests, Haitian Creole pa marks sentential negation, like French pas. Yet, this paper establishes a phrase-structural distinction between pa and pas, their cognation notwithstanding: I argue that Haitian pa heads NegP while French pas is in Spec ofNegR In so doing, I explore the syntax andsemantics of sentential negation in Haitian, especially the structural basis of negative concord in the presence of pa, compared with the double (cancelled) negation in the presence 0/pas in Standard French. l then explore the implications of my analysis of Haitian pa vis-a-vis the syntax of predication. l conclude with a sampling of the diachronic puzzle posed by pa, äs Haitian is compared to two ofits source languages. Haitian Creole emerged in the 17th Century primarily from the contact between French and a few West-African languages. This paper can be motivated from 1. I wrote this paper in room 1406 at the CUNY Graduate Center, while on an exciting post-doctoral appointment. Over the year 1992-1993, this room has seen me grow äs a linguist, and I thank Richard Kayne and uncountable CUNY people for making it all so very special. I now have, to cherish, a roomful of memortes. For help toward solving the riddle that is the topic of this paper, I thank Beatrice Santorini, Bill Stewart, Ciaire Lefebvre, Enoh Titilayo Ebong, Gillian Sankoff, Jean Nicolas, Julie Auger, John Lumsden, Liliane Haegeman, Maxime da Cruz, Michael Hegarty, Mitch Marcus, Pieter Muysken, Raffaella Zanuttini, Richard Kayne, Ronel Perrault, Rose-Marie Dechaine, Sabine latridou, Salikoko Mufwene, Tonjes Veenstra, Tony Kroch, Victor Manfredi, Viviane Deprez, two anonymous Probus reviewers, and the wonderful participants in the meeting of the Society of Caribbean Linguistics in Barbados, in the Going Romance Symposium in Utrecht and in colloquia at CUNY, Georgetown University and UMass Amherst. I am more than grateful to Yves Dejean, of Haiti, for extensive and illuminating written comments (dated 6/21/93) and intense telephone debates — Iv monchö, mesianpil! Probus 5 (1993), 63-93 0921-4471/93/0005-0063

The Ecology of Language Evolution in Latin America: A Haitian Postscript toward a Postcolonial Sequel

While reading the preceding chapters in this volume, on Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America, I kept trading two distinct hats on my bald head: one for the theoretical linguist interested in the cognitive aspects of language contact and language evolution, the other for the MIT professor challenged by social injustice in language policy and education in my native Haiti and other Creole-speaking communities. These communities, like many others in the world, including the United States, still suff er from insidious colonial and neocolonial imperialist prejudices and practices. By the time I fi nished those chapters, I realized that the two hats are fundamentally made of the same material. As a theoretical linguist, I was fascinated by the contributors’ insightful illustrations of the complexity of language contact in Latin America— complexity in sociohistorical, ecological, and linguistic-structural dimensions. As a Haitian and a Haitian Creole–speaking linguist, I was curious as to how language shift, language change, language endangerment, and (meta-)linguistic correlates of social hierarchies in Iberian America may help us better understand related phenomena in the Caribbean, and vice versa. I’ve used the phrases Latin America and Iberian America with some trepidation, as I realize that the chapters to which I am responding have focused exclusively on areas of Latin America that were colonized by the Spanish or the Portuguese, leaving aside Latin American territories that were or are still under the control of France. Now consider my native Haiti, where both French and a French-derived Creole are spoken; Haitian Creole is spoken by virtually everyone there, and French by a small minority, no more than 10 percent (Dejean 2006). Taking the Latin in Latin America in its linguistic genealogical sense, we can then consider Haiti at least as “Latin” as Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, and so forth. Those who still subscribe to the classic dogma that Creoles derive from pidgins and therefore fall outside the scope of the comparative method and its associated Stammbaum (“family tree”) model for language change