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KI in Mauritian Creole: Which factors (dis)favor omission/insertion? | title | KI in Mauritian Creole: Which factors (dis)favor omission/insertion? |
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| start_date | 2025/11/17 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h30h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 124 & sur zoom |
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| summary | Variable complementizer omission is one of the classic topics in variation and register studies since the seminal works of Sankoff and Cedergren (1972) and Biber (1999). While standard French does not allow complementizer omission, it is common in non-standard varieties and in French outside France (Liang et al., 2021). Alleesaib et al. (2024) find that omission of que in Mauritian French is even more frequent than in the Caribbean and Canadian contexts. Their study reveals that spoken data show a lot more omission, and that certain grammatical factors (negation on the embedding verb, subject of the embedded clause other than personal pronoun) disfavour omission. They briefly compare it to Mauritian Creole, where they find very high rates of omission (92% in a spoken corpus) and hypothesize an impact of negation.
The question, however, is whether in Mauritian Creole the complementizer ki is omitted or inserted in embedded contexts. Our study examines the use of ki in Mauritian Creole in more detail on the basis of a large spoken corpus (Veenstra, 2016) that has a special focus on register variation. This corpus contains recordings of speakers in different situations, which makes it suitable to study situation-specific variation. We compare our findings to the results of Alleesaib et al. (2024) on Mauritian French, taking different grammatical factors (embedding verb, verb class, negation, beginning and subject of the subordinate) and social factors into account.
We show that the insertion of ki takes place more often with specific verbs (realize, remarke, dekouver, montre) than with prototypical ones (dir, kone, krwar) and argue that this is related to register and possibly points towards influence from French. This implies that Mauritian Creole has basically the same subordination system with two complementizers (∅ vs pou) as we find in most of the French-related creoles in the Caribbean, as has been argued for Haitian Creole (Lefebvre, 1998) and Guadeloupean Creole (Kezerian et al., 2025). |
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| responsibles | Cabredo Hofherr |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2025/11/04 14:37 UTC |
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