Date of Award
5-10-2026
Date Published
June 2026
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics
Advisor(s)
Jaklin Kornfilt
Keywords
Bilingualism;Complementation;Fieldwork;Guadeloupean Creole;Natural Language Processing;Syntactic Variation
Subject Categories
Linguistics | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
This thesis presents an experimental and computational investigation of complementizer variation in Guadeloupean Creole (GC). Despite its morphosyntactic innovations distinct from its lexifier, French, the subordinate structure of GC remains understudied. The project presented here involves a psycholinguistic experiment targeting complementizer usage, using binary choice tasks to gather grammaticality judgments. This was administered during field research in Guadeloupe to 9 youth speakers and 11 adult speakers of GC and French. Ethnographic interview recordings in GC were also collected from adult speakers, which were then transcribed for the purpose of text extraction of key words. I use NLP text-mining methods such as n-gram extraction and frequency counting to analyze patterns from the transcripts of these naturalistic conversations. The primary aims of the study are to determine if a contrast exists between youth and adults with respect to the usage of the overt complementizer kè, and to determine if adult speakers are consistent with overt kè usage between natural speech and grammaticality judgments. Experimental results reveal that adult speakers are highly variable in their usage of overt kè, and that by contrast youth are consistent with a slight preference for the covert complementizer. Computational results reveal inconsistencies between naturalistic adult speech and their experimental results. This could indicate that a speaker's opinions about the status of the overt complementizer might not be reflected in their spoken GC.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Kezerian, William Joseph, "Complementation in Guadeloupean Creole: An Experimental and Computational Account" (2026). Theses - ALL. 1040.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/1040
