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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. 49–95

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Chapter 2
Evidence of topic-prominence in Mauritian Creole

A typological shift from French to Creole

 | University of New England
Published online: 7 April 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.61.02gui
Abstract
This chapter aims to shed light on the function of the morphemes li, sa and se, that licence Topic-prominence in Mauritian Creole. The prevalence of Topic-Comment sentence structure, subjectless sentences, and a limited use of passives in the Creole provide evidence of a typological shift from Subject-prominence to Topic-prominence. This is attributed to the loss of the French functional categories, namely the definite article, the copula, and a Case assigning preposition. The occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions triggered a shift in noun denotation from predicative in French to argumental in the Creole, where bare nouns can function as topics without the need for Case assignment or quantification by an external operator. Topic-prominence is also attested in the noun phrase, where genitive constructions are shown to be Topic-Possessive structures. Finally, the specificity marker la is analyzed as a discourse Topic marker. The analysis provides an insight into processes of creolization and grammaticalization.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Creole typology
    • 1.2Characteristics of subject-prominent and topic-prominent languages
    • 1.3Syntactic framework and assumptions
    • 1.4Organisation of this chapter
  • 2.Subject and topic — definitions and syntactic derivations
    • 2.1What is the subject?
    • 2.2What is the topic?
    • 2.3Thetic and categorical judgements
    • 2.4Deriving the topic
    • 2.5Sentence topic and discourse topic
      • 2.5.1The spread of Topic-prominence — The case of non-standard French
  • 3.The rise of topic prominence in early Mauritian Creole
    • 3.1The loss of the French definite article
      • 3.1.1The interpretation of bare nouns in Mauritian Creole
      • 3.1.2The role of context
      • 3.1.3A comparison of Mauritian Creole and English nouns
      • 3.1.4The Number feature of nouns and the null definite article
    • 3.2The loss of the French copula être
    • 3.3The loss of case assigning preposition de
  • 4.Licensing topic-prominence in the modern Mauritian Creole clause
    • 4.1The resumptive pronouns li/zot
      • 4.1.1The topic marker ‘i’ in Seselwa
    • 4.2Se — demonstrative pronoun or copula?
    • 4.3Different functions of li/zot and se
      • 4.3.1A comparison with Haitian Creole se
      • 4.3.2From pronoun to copula?
    • 4.4The demonstrative pronoun sa
  • 5.Further evidence of topic prominence in Mauritian Creole
    • 5.1Subjectless sentences
    • 5.2Limited use of passives
  • 6.Topic prominence in the Mauritian Creole noun phrase
    • 6.1‘La’ marks specificity and topic in discourse
      • 6.1.1Parallel structures of CP and DP
    • 6.2The rise of Saxon-type genitives
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (139)
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