The Bislama noun phrase: evidence for the DP hypothesis?

Bislama is an English-lexified extended pidgin that is widely spoken across the islands of Vanuatu in the Pacific Ocean (Crowley 2004). Bislama is the sole national language of the Republic of Vanuatu and one of three official languages alongside French and English. It is used as a lingua franca across the country and is seen as a symbol of national identity (Lewis et al. 2016). This current work-in-progress aims to investigate to what extent the DP hypothesis (Abney 1987; Bernstein 2001) can satisfactorily account for the features found in the structure of the Bislama noun phrase. In particular, the construction of possessive noun phrases, adjective/noun order and the semantic arguments of the noun will be focussed on. The project aims to add to existing research on Bislama, as well as augmenting existing evidence for the DP hypothesis in pidgin and creole languages (Baptista 2007). To achieve this, a corpus consisting of 850 Bislama online news articles, retrieved from Vanuatu Daily Post, totalling just over 273,500 words has been compiled using specifically designed software. This corpus will be analysed to reveal frequent noun phrase constructions, which will constitute the data for this project. Using this data, I plan to test the hypothesis that Bislama demonstrates Noun + Genitive, Article + Noun, Plural word + Noun and Numeral + Noun word order, based on predictions of the head-dependent theory (Dryer 1992). Abney, Steven Paul (1987) The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect. PhD dissertation, MIT Baptista, Marlyse (2007) On the syntax and semantics of DP in Cape Verdean Creole. In: Baptista, Marlyse and Guéron, Jacqueline (eds) Noun Phrases in Creole Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company 61-106 Bernstein, Judy B. (2001) The DP Hypothesis: Identifying Clausal Properties in the Nominal Domain. In: Baltin, Mark and Collins, Chris (eds.) The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 536- 561 Crowley, Terry (2004) Bislama Reference Grammar. United States of America: University of Hawai’i Press Dryer, Matthew S. (1992) The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations. Language 68 (1). Washington: Linguistic Society of America. 81- 138 Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2016. Ethnologue: languages of the world. 19th edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com