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Part of
Theoretical Approaches to Linguistic Variation
Edited by Ermenegildo Bidese, Federica Cognola and Manuela Caterina Moroni
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 234] 2016
► pp. 317–336

Little v and cross-linguistic variation

Evidence from code switching and the Surinamese creoles

ORCID logo | Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
| University of Illinois at Chicago
The main claim of this paper is that little v is responsible for a range of grammatical properties of the predicate phrase that it selects for. Bilingual light verb constructions in several code-switching varieties provide strong evidence for this claim. It allows us to broaden the empirical scope and deepen the theoretical insights of the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture concerning parametric variation, and provides a new insight into the clause structure of creole languages.
Keywords: copulas, cross-linguistic variation, little v, roots, word order
Published online: 1 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.234.12vee
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