THE ROLE OF SEMANTIC REFERENTIAL DEFICIENCY IN CABO-VERDEAN CREOLE SUBJECT EXPRESSION¬: VARIABLE CHOICE OF THIRD PERSON REDUCED REFERRING DEVICE

Abstract

This study examines the influence of ‘semantic referential deficiency’―consisting of nonhuman, nonspecific, and indefinite reference―in variable third-person subject expression in a corpus of naturalistic Cabo-Verdean Creole discourse collected from respondents from the islands of Santiago and Maio. The methodology follows the Probabilistic Linguistics program (CLAES, 2017) in combining variationist sociolinguistics with cognitively-oriented discourse analysis, whereas the notion of semantic referential deficiency is adopted from Generative Grammar and from research on Brazilian Portuguese argument expression. The coded corpus data were submitted to a suite of descriptive and inferential statistical analyses in R (R CORE TEAM, 2021). Results show a promoting effect from nonhuman and collective referents on the selection of zero or null subjects, alongside other predictors related to referential coherence and accessibility.