A few remarks on gender in Martinican Creole

Abstract

This paper argues that, besides natural gender which it has long possessed, Martinican Creole (MQ) is developing the category of grammatical gender. Evidence for this claim is adduced from the so-called marker of semantic definiteness LA - described in Zribi-Hertz & JeanLouis (2014). Based on the previously unnoticed fact that this marker has two more allomorphs, viz. lè- and li-), and that its realization depends on the gender of the French cognate of the root it associates with, I argue that LA - is in fact the spell-out of a variant of n which bears the features [-SORTAL] and [±FEM]. I propose that, owing to its contact with French, MQ is undergoing a process of feature recombination which affects the inventory of its ns and whose outcome may be the introduction of grammatical gender. The absence of grammatical gender agreement on other categories suggests that the process remains incomplete.