Linguistics graduate student Yushi Sugimoto will present "Forming the Structural Spine of Creole Languages: A neo-constructivist approach to Creole Languages." Please visit the Cognitive Science Seminar Series website for Zoom access information.

ABSTRACT
In this presentation I suggest that that the formation of the functional categories can be underspecified, which will yield “hybrid grammar”(Aboh 2009, 2015), assuming that syntactic configuration determines the information such as argument structure based on a neo-constructivist approach to mono/bilingual/creole Grammar (Borer2003, Marantz 1997, Lohndal 2014, Riksem 2018).
In the language mixing in which the words are mixed within the same categories such as nominal phrases, functional categories (FCs) are determined by one of the two languages and the roots are determined by the other language. Thus, even if the language is “mixed,” it does not mix the properties of FCs (Grimstad et al. 2018, Riksem et al. 2019). I will argue that, for some creole languages, unlike some patterns of language mixing whose FCs are selected by one of the source languages, FCs are formed derivationally, resulting in having the hybrid nature of FCs.