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Eski fitir-la touzour insertin? Is the future still uncertain?

The acceptability of Mauritian Creole’s elusive VA marker in future contexts

ORCiD logo with link | University of Cambridge, UK
ORCiD logo with link | University of Oxford, UK
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Oxford.

Published online: 2 June 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.24031.dav
Abstract
Most research regarding Mauritian Creole future marking was carried out in the 1990s and assumed differences in ‘certainty’ dictated the choice of future marker (. 1993. Contribution à l’histoire du futur en créole mauricien. Etudes Créoles 16(1). 87–100.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Hazaël-Massieux, Guy. 1993. L’expression du futur en créole mauricien, Etudes Creoles. 16(1). 61–75.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Touchard, Yves & Daniel Véronique. 1993. À propos d’une enquête sur pu et va en mauricien. Etudes Creoles 16(1). 76–86.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The consensus was that the two main markers, POU and VA, were used for ‘definite’ and ‘indefinite’ future events respectively. However, this distinction was inadequately defined, and although intuitively solid, it could not account for many naturally occurring instances. Davidson, Hannah. 2021. The development of tense, mood and aspect markers in Mauritian Creole. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Oxford. quantified a range of features relevant for future expression and a new obligation meaning of VA was mentioned by some speakers. In this paper, we explore in more detail the POU/VA opposition, considering contexts with different nuances of obligation/necessity and their compatibility with VA. Overall, VA is more acceptable in contexts which can be interpreted as obligation/necessity and it is now not only restricted to indefinite or ‘less certain’ contexts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
    • 2.1Mauritian Creole future marking
    • 2.2Grammaticalization
    • 2.3Previous results regarding VA
  • 3.Current acceptability judgement follow-up
    • 3.1Method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Mean results for relevant sentences
      • Context 11
      • Context 7–9
      • Context 3
      • Context 18
      • Context 19
      • Context 12
    • 4.2Case study of three of the participants
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
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