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In current syntactic theory functional categories play an important role in determining the structure of clauses and noun phrases. While in 'regular' language change the content of functional categories seems to be relatively stable, in many language contact situations, e.g. creolization, code-switching, functional categories are lost and, subsequently, reconstituted. A major issue hereby is on which grammatical knowledge speakers model the reconstitution of these elements. Some of the specific questions to be adressed in this session are:
(i) Which functional categories are necessarily reconstituted, and which are not? This relates to the issues of universality (or UG-compatibility) and markedness of functional categories.
(ii) What type of functional categories are reconstituted: those that contribute to meaning (LF-interpretable), or those that only convey grammatical information, or both?
(iii) Which lexical categories are used as a model for reconstitution and, consequently, are reinterpreted as functional categories?
(iv) From which language(s) in the contact situation are the (lexical or grammatical)
elements drawn used for reconstitution of functional categories?
This session is of interest to creolists, historical linguists, code-switching researchers, syntacticians, researchers of second language acquisition, and psycholinguists.