On naming and definiteness

Describing a modern variety of Martinique Creole spoken by French-Creole bilinguals, we show that this language uses two different subgrammars to express ‘definiteness’, viz to signal a uniqueness presupposition on a discourse referent: (i) the enclitic determiner - la , arguably located in a phrase-peripheral D head which has been shown by Térosier ( 2021 , 2022 ) to convey two subtypes of discourse-linking; (ii) a dedicated morphosyntax for noun phrases we call names , which are rigid designators. Our study leads us to distinguish names (a class of noun phrases) from proper nouns (a class of lexemes); and to discard the assumption that Definiteness instantiates a single feature (possibly either ‘strong’ or ‘weak’) linked to a single phrase-peripheral D head (Longobardi passim , Matushansky 2023 ). The grammar of MQ rather indicates that uniqueness presuppositions may arise independently of the D head.