# Martinican complement clauses in ke: a statistical approach: how to explain variation?

Minella Duzerol

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Minella Duzerol. Martinican complement clauses in ke: a statistical approach: how to explain variation?. 1ère Rencontre annuelle Langues et langage à la croisée des disciplines, Sep 2024, Paris, France. hal-04914124

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https://hal.science/hal-04914124v1

Submitted on 27 Jan 2025

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Martinican complement clauses in *ke*: how to explain variation?

Duzerol Minella, Dynamique du Langage, CNRS/Lyon 2

Keywords: Martinican, creoles, subordination, complementation, variation, sociogrammar

Martinican is a French-based creole language spoken in the French Caribbean island of Martinique by about 400.000 persons, bilingual in Martinican and French at different degrees. The literature on complement clauses in Martinican (Pinalie and Bernabé 1999; Jeannot-Fourcaud 2003; Damoiseau 2012; Colot and Ludwig 2013; Syea 2017) points to a construction alternation for semantically equivalent complement clauses. The literature states that most complement clauses are formed without any subordinator, as in (1).

(1)
[...] *zot di* [zot *ka monté*]
2PL say 2PL IPFV go.up
[...]‘you said you are going up’
Descri OTA 1 031

An alternate construction is sometimes used, that differs from the former in that it is introduced
by a subordinator, *ki*, *ké* or *ke*, as in (2).

(2)
*man pé di* [**ke man té ka joué**]
1SG can say SUB 1SG PST IPFV play
'I can say that I used to play'
FLU Narr 006

The use of a subordinator is explained by an influence of French. Besides, following the
linguistic representations, speakers that are the most exposed to French would be those
producing it most frequently. Yet, few papers tackle this variation with linguistic and non-
linguistic variables, on the basis of a corpus study. In this paper, I present the results of a
descriptive corpus-based study of the variation between absence and presence of a subordinator
in the declarative complement clauses, that benefits from the statistical approach. The database
at hand (Duzerol 2023) gathers 112 complement clauses extracted from 110 minutes of
narrations and descriptions collected by the author with the collaboration of 18 Martinican
speakers. Twelve linguistic (morphosyntactic, semantic) and non-linguistic (information
processing, sociolinguistics) variables are under scrutiny. Generalized mixed models were
implemented by Marc Allasonnière-Tang. Firstly, the statistical results align with Jeannot-
Fourcaud’s (2003) suggestions: for the database, no social variable is statistically significant.
These results come in opposition with the explanation of so-called French-influenced changes
triggered by those who are the most exposed to French. Second, for the database, this
alternation can be statistically explained by information processing needs, in a similar fashion
to what has been observed for languages such as the Santiago variety of Cap Verdean (Araújo
Vieira Semedo 2021) or English (Casasanto and Stag 2008; Jaeger 2010). For the database, the
density of information within and around a given complement clause has a statistical effect on
the presence of a subordinator at the beginning of this complement clause.

References

Araújo Vieira Semedo, Eliane Cristina. 2021. ‘Frase Complexa Em Cabo-Verdiano (Variedade de Santiago): Um Estudo Da Integração Entre Cláusulas)’. Theses, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales- INALCO PARIS - LANGUES O’ ; Universidade federal do Ceará. https://theses.hal.science/tel-03469603.

Casasanto, Laura Staum, and Ivan A. Stag. 2008. ‘The Advantage of the Ungrammatical’. *Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society*, no. 30. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tm38849.

Colot, Serge, and Ralph Ludwig. 2013. ‘Guadeloupean and Martinican Creole’. In *The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Volume 2: Portuguese-Based, Spanish-Based, and French-Based Languages*, edited by Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://apics-online.info/surveys/50.

Damoiseau, Robert. 2012. *Syntaxe Créole Comparée: Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, Haïti*. Dictionnaires et Langues. Fort-de-France : Paris: CRDP Martinique ; Karthala.

Duzerol, Minella. 2023. ‘Complétives et Relatives En Martiniquais (Créole, Martinique)’. [Corpus]. ORTOLANG (Open Resources and TOols for LANGuage) - www.ortolang.fr. https://hdl.handle.net/11403/basededonnees-these.

Jaeger, Florian T. 2010. ‘Redundancy and Reduction: Speakers Manage Syntactic Information Density’. *Cognitive Psychology* 61 (1): 23–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.02.002.

Jeannot-Fourcaud, Béatrice. 2003. ‘De l’opposition Verbo-Nominale En Créole Martiniquais : Approche Fonctionnaliste’. PhD Thesis. http://www.theses.fr/2003PA05H046.

Pinalie, Pierre, and Jean Bernabé. 1999. *Grammaire Du Créole Martiniquais En 50 Leçons*. Editions L’Harmattan.

Syea, Anand. 2017. *French Creoles: A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar*. http://site.ebrary.com/id/11326154.