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In:New Perspectives on Mauritian Creole and Reunion Creole: Standardization, grammar and language use
Edited by Muhsina Alleesaib and Julie Lefort
[Contact Language Library 61] 2025
► pp. 18–48

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Chapter 1
Cognates of French articles in contemporary Reunion Creole

 | Université de La Réunion Laboratoire Structures Formelles du Langage
Published online: 7 April 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.61.01alb
Abstract
This chapter provides a description of cognates of French articles in Reunion Creole (or Réyoné) and certain prenominal forms which are not found in other Creoles of the area: la and lo as well as /le/ and /de/. It has been assumed that these forms display more or less the same functions as in French where they are articles encoding definiteness, number and gender. We will show that this is not the case. Our study investigates the morphosyntactic status and the semantic contributions of these expressions, in particular la, and offers some comparisons to French and Bantu languages, as well as insights on the grammaticalization process.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Background and scope
    • 1.2Réyoné grammatical sketch
    • 1.3The noun phrase
    • 1.4Traditional accounts of lo, la, /le/, and /de/
    • 1.5Problems with previous accounts
    • 1.6Aim and outline of the study
  • 2.Gender
    • 2.1Absence of feminine agreement
    • 2.2La is not a feminine variant of the definite determiner lo
    • 2.3Noun classes
  • 3.An analysis for la: La-nouns as abstract concepts
    • 3.1Non-argument positions
    • 3.2Non-referential NPs in argument positions
  • 4.Lo1: A phonological material in allomorphic nouns
  • 5.Lo2: A determiner
  • 6.Lo and la: Grammaticalization and article agglutination
  • 7./Le/ and /de/ sequences
  • 8.Summary
  • Notes
  • References
References (47)
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